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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GOOD CHEER 

FOR A YEAR 



SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF THE 

Rt. Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. 



BY 

W. M. L. JAY 



All life which would not grow stale and monotonous must feed itself upon 
God. . . . All life which would make To-day the transmutation place 
where Yesterday shall give its power to Forever, must be full of the felt 
presence of Him in whom yesterday, to-day and forever are all one.- vi. 344. 

j JUL30189B 7 

NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

3 1 West Twenty-third Street 

1896 







Copyright, 1896, by 
E. P. DUTTON & CO. 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



PREFACE. 

It is too soon to let the ministry of Bishop 
Brooks pass into the shadow of forgetfulness. 
He "yet speaketh " in a multitude of works 
which, in a remarkable degree, combine lofty 
spirituality and plain practicalness with rare 
human sympathy, and are therefore particu- 
larly well adapted to the sustenance and guid- 
ance of the daily Christian life. There are 
those who are so fortunate as to be able to 
study these works as a whole, but there are 
also many busy people who are glad to have 
one thought, suitable and sufficient unto the 
day, ready to their hands in a convenient 
form. To such a second year-book is offered, 
not by the same hand as the first, but com- 
piled on the same plan, for the excellent 
reason that it cannot be bettered. 

The labor of making the book has been 
increased by the abundance of the material. 
Many year-books might be quarried out of it 
without exhausting its richness and variety, 
or its wealth of helpful suggestion for those 
who are trying to live the life of faith in uni- 



iv PREFACE. 

son with the life of action, to "round every 
truth with its duty, and deepen every duty 
into its truth." Inevitably the thought comes 
that such a daily ministry to hearts thrilled and 
elated with life's duties and joys, or sore and 
weary with its burdens, must be deeply grat- 
ifying to him with whose rich and abundant 
life of faith and works it is impossible to asso- 
ciate any thought of death. The monks of 
Antioch were wont to say of a brother, not 
" He is dead/' but '" He is perfected." 

For those who like to follow the Christian 
Year, and who may wish to use the book 
more than once, selections for the greater 
movable fasts and feasts are appended to the 

volume. 

W. M. L. Jay. 



Sermons, ist Series, 

Sermons, 2d Series, 

Sermons, 3D Series, 

Sermons, 4.TH Series, 

Sermons, 5TH Series, 

Sermons, 6th Series, 

Sermons for the Principal Festivals 

Fasts, 

The Influence of Jesus, 

Yale Lectures on Preaching, 

Essays and Addresses, 

The Life Here and 'the Life Hereafter, 

The Good Wine at the Feast's End, . 



I 

II 

III 

IV 

V 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 

X 

XI 
XII 



[The Roman numerals at the end of the selections refer 
to the above list of books ; the Arabic numerals to the 
pages where the selections may be found.] 



JANUARY i. i 

Be strong and of a good courage, . . . for the 
Lord thy God is with thee wherever thou goest. 

Josh. i. 9. 

THE poetry of all growing life consists in 
' carrying an oldness into a newness, a past 
into a future, always. So only can our days 
possibly be " bound each to each by natural 
piety." I would not for the world think that 
twenty years hence I should have ceased to see 
the things which I see now, and love them still. 
It would make life wearisome beyond expres- 
sion if I thought that twenty years hence I 
should see them just as I see them now, and 
love them with no deeper love because of other 
visions of their lovableness. And so there 
comes this deep and simple rule for any man 
as he crosses the line dividing one period of 
his life from another: Make it a time in which 
you shall realize your faith, and also in which 
you shall expect of your faith new and greater 
things. Take what you believe and are and 
hold it in your hand with new firmness as you 
go forward; but as you go, holding it, look on 
it with continual and confident expectation to 
see it open into something greater and truer. 

V. 296. 

Go with the sun and the stars, and yet ever- 
more in thy spirit 

Say to thyself: It is good, yet there is better 
than it: 

This that I see is not all, and this that I do is 
but little; 

Nevertheless it is good, though there is better 
than it. Arthur Hugh Clough. 



JANUARY 2. 



I think that nothing made is lost, 
That not a moon has ever shone, 

That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed, 
But to my soul is gone; 

That all the lost years garnered lie 
In this Thy casket, my dim soul; 

And Thou wilt, once, the key supply, 
And show the shining whole. 

George Macdonald. 

WHILE we leave everything behind in time, 
it is no less true that nothing is wholly 
left behind. All that we ever have been or 
done is with us in some power and consequence 
of it until the end. . . . The unity of life is 
never lost. There must not be. any waste. 
How great and gracious is the economy of 
life which it involves! Neither to dwell in 
any experience always, nor to count any ex- 
perience as if it had not been, but to leave 
the forms of our experiences behind, and to 
go forth from them clothed in their spiritual 
power, which is infinitely free and capable of 
new activities, — this is what God is always 
teaching us is possible, and tempting us to do. 
To him who does it come the two great bless- 
ings of a growing life, — faithfulness and lib- 
erty: faithfulness in each moment's task, and 
liberty to enter through the gates beyond 
which lies the larger future. " Well done, 
good servant: thou hast been faithful over a 
few things. Enter thou into the joy of thy 
Lord. 

VI. 57, 58. 



JANUARY 3. 



And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the 
Spirit of His Son into your hearts^ crying, Abba, 
Father. — Gal. iv. 6. 

WERE there ever verses that had a sub- 
limer occupancy ? God is there, and 
Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. And in the 
midst of them all, as the being for whom they 
all are working, there is man. As the win- 
dows of these verses open, this is what we see: 
all the prevalent influence of heaven gathered 
around man, and by its united power bringing 
him into the perfect sympathy of God. The 
Father sees him and loves him; the Son comes 
and seeks him; the Spirit spreads through his 
heart the sense of all this love; and then he, 
loved, redeemed, and quickened, reconciled to 
God, is seen, at the last, lifting up his hands 
and claiming God, crying, "Abba, Father." 
What a vast chorus of sublimest life! How 
the soul stands amazed and awed! Here are 
all heaven and all that is capable of heavenli- 
ness upon earth met together, and the end 
of their meeting is complete accord. God is 
pouring His life into man. Man is sending 
back his tribute — rendering his life to God. 
It is the chorus of reconciled Divinity and 
humanity. VII. 99. 



O wonderful, oh, passing thought, 
The love that God hath had for thee, 

Spending on thee no less a sum 
Than the undivided Trinity! 

Faber. 



JANUARY 4. 



From glory to glory, — 2 Cor. iii. 18. 

WHEN Saint Paul wants to depict the vast 
variety of which the world is full, it 
was distinctly as a variety of glory that he 
conceived of it. Enough he knew of the vari- 
ety of woe. Easily enough he might have de- 
picted how man, the same man still, was tossed 
from suffering to suffering and remained the 
same identical miserable sufferer in all. It 
would have been the same truth taught upon 
its darker side. But Paul knew that the true 
side on which to teach it was its side of light. 
The real variety of life is a variety of glories. 
Such a choice of the side from which to draw 
his illustration is a noble characteristic of 
Saint Paul. It is a sign of how healthy he is. 
Change from glory into glory, — that was what 
life seemed to him. Remember, it is no rap- 
turous and untired boy who is talking; it is a 
man all sore with sorrow, beaten and broken 
with disappointment and distress. Is it not a 
sign of what a true Christian he was that life 
seemed to him still to be only a variety and 
constant interchange of glories ? v. 62. 

" From glory unto glory ! " What great 
things He hath done! ... 

But sweeter than the Christmas chimes rings 
out His promise clear — 

That " greater things," far greater, our long- 
ing eyes shall see! 

We can but wait and wonder what " greater 
things" shall be. 

Frances R. Havergal. 



JANUARY 5. 



" Comest thou as friend ? 
Comest thou as foe ? " 

" Nay, 'tis thou wilt bend 
Me to weal or woe. 
As thou usest me, 
Shall I be to thee 
Friend or foe." 

J. L. M. W. 

^THINGS are what they are used for. . . . 
* The artist uses a stone, and it is a statue; 
the mason uses a stone, and it is a doorstep. 
And beyond mere nature. See how we use 
men. We are each other's raw material. I 
make you up in some shape into my life, and 
you in some way make me up into yours. But 
what man is of so fixed a character that he 
can be made up only into one invariable thing ? 
Each man makes of his neighbor that for which 
he uses him. . . . 

So of all influences and motives. The same 
educations wall and press upon two lives. One 
rises on them into greatness, the other drags 
them down upon it and is crushed beneath 
them into ruin. . . . How is it that the Phari- 
see and the Publican came down the same 
temple steps, one cold, and proud, and bitter, 
and the other with his heart full of tenderness, 
and gratitude, and humblest charity ? 

VI. 25, 26. 



JANUARY 6. 



Shine as lights in the world ; Holding forth the 
word of life, — Phil. ii. 15, 16. 

A MAN'S place is made ready for him in 
the mind of God; the man's life is set 
here as a positive, clear fact; and what comes 
next ? There is no doubt what ought to come. 
That life must tell. It must go out beyond 
itself. It must have influence. It must tes- 
tify and supplement the mere fact of its exist- 
ence by making other existences be something 
which they would not be without it. This 
seems so plain. This is so clearly set forth in 
the great typical life of Jesus. . . . Can you 
picture to yourself God coming into this world 
and then living a perfectly self-contained life 
— one that recognized no relations with and 
exercised no power over other lives about 
Him ? No! The epiphany followed immedi- 
ately on the advent and the nativity. . . . 
He let His life go forth on other lives. He 
let His great light shine before men. But how 
many there are who realize their advent and 
their nativity who have never conceived for 
themselves of an epiphany! . . . never have 
dreamed that they were put here where they 
are, and made to be what they are, in order 
that other men might be something else through 
them. 

VII. 8, 9. 

All are needed by each one: 
Nothing is fair or good alone. 

Emerson. 



JANUARY 7. 



The So 71 of Man came not to be iiiinistered unto, 
but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for 
many. — Mark x. 45. 

THERE are theories of self-culture which 
are printed in books, given as very gos- 
pels to our children as they grow up, which 
would be just exactly the same that they now 
are if no such dream as a possible duty of use- 
fulness and influence from that child to other 
people had ever entered into the thought of God 
or man. ... "Be strong, be rich, be wise, 
be good." What for? "Why, so that you 
may be wise and rich and strong and good." 
The endless circle, with its bright monotonous 
round! No wonder that so many young men 
are asking in the bottom of their hearts ques- 
tions of most terrible skepticism: "What is 
the use ? Is it worth while to be wise and 
strong and rich and good ? " Ah, you must 
find the use outside yourself. You must let 
your light shine before men, that they may 
see your good works, and glorify your Father 
which is in heaven. You must complete your 
advent and nativity with an epiphany of your- 
self. Then it will seem well worth while to 
light your human light most brilliantly and 
keep it trimmed most vigilantly. 

Only shine toward your brethren's lives, 
only be your best in their direction. 

VII. 9, 10. 

What others claim from us is not our thirst and our 
hunger, but our bread and our gourd. 

Amiel. 



JANUARY 8. 



He hath made everything beautiful in His time. 

Eccles. iii. ii. 

FOR sin and holiness are not in things, but 
in souls; and all things are beautiful in 
the time when a soul uses them for holy uses 
with a loving, humble, and obedient life. . . . 
The human soul sits at the centre of every- 
thing, and Christ sits at the centre of the hu- 
man soul. If he changes us, then everything 
will be changed to us. " He that sitteth upon 
the throne saith, Behold I make all things 
new! " If the world is ugly and bitter and 
cruel to you: if circumstances taunt and per- 
secute you: if everything you touch is a strain 
and a temptation, do not stand idly wishing 
that the world were changed. The change 
must be in you. To the new hea'rt all things 
shall be new. The new man shall see already 
the new heaven and the new earth. If any 
man be in Christ, he is a new creature; and 
the new creature is immediately in the new 
creation. Some of you know already by daily 
experience what that means. And for all of 
you, it waits to be revealed, if you will let 
Christ do His work in you. iv. 261. 

There is a rest that deeper grows 

In midst of pain and strife; 
A mighty, conscious, willed repose, 

The heart of deepest life. 
To have and hold the precious prize, 

No need of jealous bars, 
But windows open to the skies, 

And skill to read the stars. 

George Macdonald. 



JANUARY 9. 



" C^\ ^~® ^ e nothing, nothing! " cries the 
V^/j mystic singer in his revival hymn, 
desiring to lose himself in God. " Nay, not 
that; O, to be something, something," remon- 
strates the unmystical man, longing for work, 
ardent for personal life and character. Where 
is the meeting of the two ? How shall self- 
surrender meet that high self-value without 
which no man can justify his living and honor 
himself in his humanity ? Where can they meet 
but in this truth ? Man must be something 
that he may be nothing. The something which 
he must be must consist in simple fitness to 
utter the divine life which is the only original 
power in the universe. And then man must 
be nothing that he may be something. He 
must submit himself in obedience to God, that 
so God may use him, in some way in which 
his special nature only could be used, to illu- 
minate and help the world. Tell me, do not 
the two cries meet in that one aspiration of 
the Christian man to find his life by losing it 
in God, to be himself by being not his own 
but Christ's ? II. 18. 

I could not choose a larger bliss 

Than to be wholly Thine; and mine 

A will whose highest joy is this, 
To ceaselessly unclasp in Thine. 

We are not losers thus; we share 
The perfect gladness of the Son, — 

Not conquered, for, behold, we reign, 
Conquered and Conqueror are one. 

Jean Sophia Pigott. 



io JANUARY 10. 



Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us ? 

Luke ii. 48. 

WHO is there of us that is not aware that 
his soul has had two educations ? . . . 
Our own government of ourselves is most evi- 
dent, is the one which we are most aware of, 
so that sometimes for a few moments we for- 
get that there is any other; but very soon our 
plans for ourselves are so turned and altered 
and hindered that we cannot ignore the other 
greater, deeper force. We meant to do that, 
and look! we have been led on to this. We 
meant to be this, and lo! we are that. We 
never meant to believe this, and lo! we hold it 
with all our hearts. What does it mean ? It 
is the everlasting discovery, the discovery 
which each thoughtful man makes for himself 
with almost as much surprise as if no other 
man had ever made it for himself before, that 
this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his 
soul only, but is God's soul too. The revela- 
tion which came of old to the Virgin Mother 
about her child — Not your child only, but 
God's child too; yours, genuinely, really 
yours, but behind yours, and over yours, 
God's. 



IV. 36. 

Why ever make man's good distinct from 

God's ? 
Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust ? 

Browning. 






JANUARY ii. ii 



1AM often struck by seeing how the loftiness 
of the life of Jesus altogether escaped the 
perplexity of many of the questions with which 
our lives are troubled, as the eagle flying 
through the sky is not worried how to cross 
the rivers. We debate whether self culture 
or our brethren's service is the true purpose of 
our life. We vacillate aimlessly. . . . We are 
so apt to live two lives. But Jesus knows but 
one. All culture of His soul is a part of our 
salvation. All doing of His work is ripening 
His nature. . . . And not until our brawling 
ceases and the champion of each side of the 
question rounds his truth with his adversary's 
truth which he has been denouncing, not until 
the apostle of self-culture knows that no man 
can come to his best by selfishness, and the 
apostle of usefulness knows that no man can 
do much for other men who is not much him- 
self, — not until then shall men have fairly 
started on the broad road to the completeness 
of God their Father in the footsteps of the 
Son of Man. 

VIII. 109. 

Let Christ be thy Life; 

Let Him be thy Meditation and thy Discourse; 

Let Him be thy Desire, thy Gain, thy whole 

Hope, and thy Reward. 
If thou seekest anything but God purely, thou 

wilt suffer loss; 
Thou shalt labor and shalt find no rest. 

Thomas a Kempis.. 



12 JANUARY 12. 

Words divine, and prayers, and blessings, 
Sorrows, sacraments, and alms, 
Humble souls, with care o'erwearied, 
Bended knees and folded palms, — 
These are working wondrous changes, 
Unperceived, except by faith. 

Caroline M. Noel. 



THINK how with the successive generations 
of mankind, each leaving countless new 
monuments of divine love and human possi- 
bility upon the earth, the earth itself is grow- 
ing richer every year. Every year some new 
valley gets its consecration from some new 
soul's struggle with sin. Every year some 
new mountain-top burns with another soul's 
rapture of salvation. We read of the prom- 
ise of the new heavens and the new earth 
wherein righteousness shall dwell. Are not 
the heavens and the earth ever growing new, 
newer, and more full of righteousness every 
day ? When the time shall come that every 
star in heaven and every stone on earth shall 
be vocal with some word of God which it 
has heard, and in their midst shall live the 
race of men, no longer deaf and obstinate, 
but quick-eared to hear and loving-hearted to 
obey those words as they come crowding in, 
making the air sacred on every side — when 
that shall come, shall not the promise then 
have been fulfilled, and the " New Heavens 
and the New Earth wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness " be a sublime reality ? 

VI. 275. 



JANUARY 13. 13 

Faith is the sun of life; and her countenance 

shines like the Hebrew's, 
For she has looked upon God. 

Longfellow. 

GOD forbid that in trying to make faith 
seem glorious, I should make it seem 
impossible! But it is true of God's gifts al- 
ways that the most complete of them are the 
most possibly universal. ... To be loved is 
better than to be admired; and admiration is 
the privilege of a few brilliant natures, while 
love is within the reach of any pure and loving 
heart. Art is the privilege of the few, but 
nature opens her treasures wide. ... If this 
be so, then how must it be with that blessing 
which outgoes all others — the blessing of faith, 
the blessing of living under the perpetually 
recognized lordship of Christ? The finest of 
all gifts of God — may we not look for it to be 
the freest also ? Free as the air, which is the 
most precious thing that the world contains, 
and yet struggles as nothing else in all the 
world struggles to give itself away. 

VI. 104, 105. 

At the devil's mart are all things sold, 
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold; 
For a cap and bells our lives we pay: 

Bubbles we earn with our whole soul's task- 
ing; 
'Tis only God that is given away, 

'Tis only heaven may be had for the asking. 
James Russell Lowell. 



i 4 JANUARY 14. 



That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, 
the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have 
life through His name. — John xx. 31. 

SUPPOSE that this divinity of Jesus be- 
comes part of a man's faith . . . suppose 
that a man really believes that, entering into 
our human life, God has been here upon earth. 
What will that belief be to him that holds 
it ? . . . The question answers itself. If to 
believe in God is a glory and delight, the 
nearer the God whom I believe in comes to me, 
the more glorious and delightful grows my life. 
To tread an earth which He has trodden, to 
think thoughts and to feel emotions which, just 
as I think and feel them, in their human shapes, 
He the eternal God has thought and felt — this 
is assuredly a marvellous enrichment of my 
living. I have gone out and up into a new 
world with this new faith — a new world, yet 
the old world still; the old world teeming and 
bursting with new meanings, radiant with new 
light, sacred and beautiful all through with 
the remembered presence of the Son of God. 
Surely no man who has once known what it is 
to live in that world can ever turn his back 
upon its richness. 

VII. 329, 330. 

No longer is our life 

A thing unused or vain; 
To us, even here, to live is Christ, 

To us to die is gain. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



JANUARY 15. 15 

The sun shall be 710 more thy light by day j 

neither for brightness shall the moon give light 

unto thee j but the Lord shall be to thee an ever- 
lasting light. — Is. lx. 19. 

THE lives of men who have been always 
growing are strewed along their whole 
course with the things which they have learned 
to do without. As the track of an army 
marching deep into an enemy's country is 
scattered all along with the equipage which 
the men seemed to find necessary when they 
started, but which they have learned to do 
without as the exigencies of their march grew 
greater, and they found that these provisions 
and equipments were partly such as they did 
not need at all, and partly such as they could 
gather out of the land through which they 
marched; so from the time when the child 
casts his leading strings aside because his legs 
are strong enough to carry him alone, the 
growing man goes on forever leaving each help 
for a higher, until at last, in that great change 
to which Isaiah's words seem to apply, he can 
do without sun and moon as he enters into the 
immediate presence and essential life of God. 

I. 283. 

I say that man was made to grow, not stop; 
That help, he needed once and needs no more, 
Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn; 
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these. 
This imports solely — man should mount on each 
New height in view : the help whereby he mounts, 
The ladder-rung his foot hath left, may fall, 
Since all things suffer change save God, the 
Truth. Browning. 



16 JANUARY 16. 



HOLINESS does not make men monotonous. 
The dimmer the light the more things 
look alike. Increase the light and then you 
see how different they are. Childhood with its 
bright hopefulness, and manhood with its en- 
terprise, and womanhood with its tenderness — 
each grows more specially itself at the touch 
of grace. The old man and the young man, 
the thinker, the artist, the worker, the mer- 
chant, the doctor, and the lawyer — out of each 
comes up to the surface a profounder individu- 
ality when they all begin to live to God. And 
the subtler differences which distinguish man 
from man and woman from woman, making 
each being a separate thought of God, unlike 
any other — these become clearer as the idea of 
God in the creation of each becomes more 
fully realized. The pebbles lie dull and dead 
and all gray alike in the dry bed of the brook 
till with the spring freshet the water comes 
pouring down and wets them all alike and 
brings out their beautiful variety of color and 
makes them all different. 

VII. 40. 



The sunlight takes the hue 
Of whatsoever shade it shineth through, 
Crimson or blue; 
And thus we find 
The One great Light, that lighteth all man- 
kind, 
Taketh a varied coloring from each mind. 

Anna E. Hamilton. 



JANUARY 17. 17 

Whatever He saith unto you , do it. 

John ii. 5. 

YOU make a friend, you read a book, you 
take a journey, you buy a house, you 
write a letter, and so full is the great world of 
God, so is He waiting everywhere to make 
Himself known and to give Himself away, 
that through this act of yours, to men who are 
looking and listening, there comes some reve- 
lation of His nature and some working of His 
power. . . . For acts have their true meanings 
in the points of manifestation and operation 
which they give to God. It was not because 
she knew that somehow they would have wine 
or something better, it was because her Son 
would surely show Himself through their obe- 
dience, if they obeyed Him, that Mary cared 
what these servants did. It is strange to 
think what a dignity and interest our own 
actions might have for us if we constantly 
recognize this capacity in them which they 
have not now. We play with bits of glass, 
finding great pleasure in their pleasant shapes, 
but never knowing what glorious things they 
would be if we held them up and let the sun 
shine through them. 

V. 346. 



O Everlasting Light, 

Shine graciously within! 
Brightest of all on earth that's bright, 

Come, shine away my sin! 

HORATIUS BOXAR. 



18 JANUARY 18. 

Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, 
. . . because they came not to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty. — Judg. v. 23. 

THE sin for which Meroz is cursed is pure 
inaction. There is no sign that its peo- 
ple gave any aid or comfort to the enemy. 
They merely did nothing. We hear so much 
about the danger of wrong thinking and the 
danger of wrong doing. There is the other 
danger, of not doing right and not thinking 
right, of not doing and not thinking at all. . . . 
Whenever men hide behind their conscious 
feebleness; whenever, because they can do so 
little, they content themselves with doing 
nothing; whenever the one-talented men stand 
with their napkins in their hands along the 
roadside of life, — there is Meroz over again. 
. . . Grant that you are as small as you think 
you are, you are the average size of moral and 
intellectual humanity. Let all the Merozes in 
the land be humble like you, and where shall 
be the army ? Only when men like you wake 
up and shake the paralysis of their humility 
away, shall we begin to see the dawn of that 
glorious millennium for which we sigh; which 
will consist not in the transformation of men 
into angels, nor in the coming forth of a few 
colossal men to be the patterns and the cham- 
pions of life, but simply in each man, through 
the length and breadth of the great world, 
doing his best. II. 291, 298, 299. 

When obstacles and trials seem 

Like prison walls to be, 
I do the little I can do, 

And leave the rest to Thee. Faber. 



JANUARY 19. 19 

And they said . . . Let not God speak with us, 
lest we die. — Ex. xx. 19. 

IS it not almost as if the fish cried, " Cast me 
not into the water, lest I drown," or as if 
the eagle said, " Let not the sun shine on me, 
lest I be blind " ? It is man fearing his native 
element. He was made to talk with God. . . . 
We find a revelation of this in all the deepest 
and highest moments of our lives. Have you 
not often been surprised by seeing how men 
who seemed to have no capacity for such ex- 
periences passed into a sense of divine com- 
panionship when anything disturbed their lives 
with supreme joy or sorrow ? Once or twice, 
at least, in his own life, almost every one of 
us has found himself face to face with God, 
and felt how natural it was to be there. Then 
all interpreters and agencies of Him have 
passed away. He has looked in on us di- 
rectly; we have looked immediately upon 
Him; and we have not died, — we have su- 
premely lived. We have known that we never 
had so lived as then. We have been aware 
how natural was that direct sympathy and 
union and communication with God. 

V. 82. 

And blest are they 
Who, in this fleshly world, the elect of Heaven, 
Their strong eye darting through the deeds 

of men, 
Adore with steadfast, unpresuming gaze 
Him, Nature's essence, mind, and energy. 

S. T. Coleridge. 



20 JANUARY 20. 

Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at 
peace j thereby good shall come unto thee. 

Job xxii. 21. 
'"THE more you come into communion with 
* God, catch His spirit, understand His 
life; the more quick your eye becomes to de- 
tect the spiritual life of other men though it 
be hidden under the strangest forms, the more 
broad your heart grows to embrace it. Com- 
ing to love God is like climbing a high moun- 
tain. It takes you out of the low valley of 
formal life. It sets you upon the open sum- 
mit of spiritual sympathy, close to the sun. 
Thence you look out into unguessed regions 
of noble thought and living, with which you 
never dreamed that you had anything to do. 
. . . There never was a man who really tried 
to serve God who did not have his sympathy 
with his fellow men widened thereby. 

VII. 314. 

ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP. 

Dear world, I behold but your largeness; I 

forget that aught evil or mean 
Ever marred the vast sphere of your beauty, 

over which as a lover I lean. 
And not by our flaws will God judge us; His 

love keeps our noblest in sight: 
Dear world, our low life sinks behind us; we 

look up to His infinite height. 

Lucy Larcom. 



M 



JANUARY 21. 21 



EN talk as if because Christ is the same 
loving, willing Christ for all of us, and 
all of us are nothing and can have nothing but 
Him, therefore the meagre, mercenary saint 
ought to shine with the same lustre as the pure 
spirit passionate for holiness, and ready for 
all the completed will of God. As if one said 
that because the sun is the same sun always, 
and because there is no light except from him, 
therefore the rose and the daisy ought to look 
alike. No! He in His love outgoes our 
prayers. He gives us more of what we ask 
than we know how to ask for; more beauty to 
the seeker after beauty, more wisdom to the 
student, more safety to the poor culprit asking 
forgiveness. And He is always trying to make 
the self which asks a larger self, that He may 
give it other things of higher kinds. But yet 
the truth remains, that at each moment He 
can give Himself to us only as at that mo- 
ment we give ourselves to Him. 

III. 285. 



Higher, purer, deeper, surer, 
Be my thought, O Christ, of Thee! 
Stretch the narrow bounds that limit 
All my earth-born, sin-bound spirit 

To the breadth of Thy divine. 

Be the image purely Thine, m 
Not my thought, but Thy creation; 

Deep within my spirit's shrine 
Make the secret revelation; 

Reproduce Thy life in mine! 

Mrs. Merrill E. Gates. 



22 JANUARY 22. 

ONE man approaches the divine Redeemer 
asking no divine redemption, but touched 
and fascinated by the beauty of that perfect 
life. He would feed his wonder, he would 
cultivate his taste, upon it. . . . Another man 
comes to Jesus with a self that is all alive with 
curiosity. He takes Christ's revelations — for 
Christ does not refuse him either — and goes 
away content to know much of God and man, 
and what there is beyond this world. . . . Each 
gets from Jesus that which the nature he 
brings can take. . . . Only when at last there 
comes a man with his self all open, with door 
behind door all unclosed, ready to give him- 
self entirely, wanting everything that Jesus 
has to give, wanting and ready to take the 
whole of Jesus into himself — only then are the 
last gates withdrawn, and as when the ocean 
gathers itself up and enters with its tide the 
open mouth of the river, ... so does the 
Lord in all His richness, with His perfect 
standards, His mighty motives, His infinite 
hopes, give Himself to the soul which has 
been utterly given to Him. in. 284, 285. 

Lord, we are rivers running to Thy sea, 
Our waves and ripples all derived from Thee; 
A nothing we should have, a nothing be, 
Except for Thee. 

Sweet are tjie waters of Thy shoreless sea, 
Make sweet our waters that make haste to 

Thee; 
Pour in Thy sweetness, that ourselves may be 
Sweetness to Thee! 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



JANUARY 23. 23 

And the king said, Is there not yet any . . . 
that I may show the kindness of God unto him ? 

2 Sam. ix. 3. 

HOW shall you make man know that God 
loves him ? In every way, — there is no 
speech nor language in which that voice may 
not be heard, — but most of all by loving the 
man with a great love yourself, by a lofty and 
generous affection of which he shall know that, 
coming through you, it comes from beyond 
you, and say, ''It is my Father that my 
brother utters," and so be led up to the 
Father's heart. We talk about men's reaching 
through Nature up to Nature's God. It is 
nothing to the way in which they may reach 
through manhood up to manhood's God, and 
learn the divine love by the human. God 
make us all such revelations of His love to 
some of His children! 

V. 50. 

For by human lovings climb we 
(As to cause from consequence) 

To some dim, imperfect vision, 
To some awed but precious sense 

Of the Love of love whose loving 
We have surnamed " Providence." 

Ah, what gladness in the glory 

Of the better land to know 
That to some poor, doubting, fearing, 

Hungering, thirsting soul below, 
All unknowing, in our loving, 

We the love of God did show. 

J. L. M. W. 



2 4 JANUARY 24. 



For our light affliction, which is but for a 
moment, worketh out for us a far more exceediZ 
^eternal weight of glory; ihile we l^kZotl 
the things which are seen, hut at the things which 
are not seen: for the things which are icTZre 
temporal; but the_ things which are not seen are 
eternal— 2 Cor. iv. 17, 18. 

QH the next life seems all so vague to us! 

W 1, \ rea f h - ° Ut after lt - We believe in it 
but how hard it is for us to take hold of it- 
How can we ? Only by living here with Him 
who is to bring us there. Only by growmg so 
familiar with Christ that when He outTun! us 
and enters in behind the veil, when the strings 

run^n S tn n t (l Uei ! 1 Ce , OUtg0 ° Ur m ° rtaI state an d 
run into the darkness, we may still feel the 

tug upon them from beyond the darkness and 

fsThere T* 7 ° f ^ beCaUSe O0 ^St 
is there. By constant living with the Eternal 

so only can you realize Eternity ' 

To welcome all His leadings now so cor- 

. dially that we shall know our Leader when He 

opens the last great door; to be always fo" 

aiufcS SO TT ° bedi t n ^ *at we shall have 
faith to follow Him when He leads us into the 
nver and into darkness,-this, and only this 
» readiness for death. VL ^/Jf' 

T^f °{ U SK stee P T hou our souls in Thee 

And fallT t? 1 i 6 day "f ht trembles int0 shad ^' 
And falls the silence of mortality 

And all ,s done, we shall not be afraid 
But pass from light to light; from earth's dull 

gleam 
Into the very heart and heaven of our dream 
Richard Watson Gilder. 



JANUARY 25. 25 

And suddenly there shine d round about him a 
light from heaven : . . . And he trembling and 
astonished said, Lord, what wilt Thou have me to 
do? — Acts ix. 3, 6. 

WE talk so much about confession and 
forgiveness; we elaborate their theory 
so much; we see such intricate relations of 
the divine and human natures involved in the 
transaction, that we almost unconsciously 
transfer the long train of thought into a long 
period of time. We feel as if that result 
which implies so much spiritual action must 
be reached only by a process of correspond- 
ingly prolonged duration. " To confess and 
be forgiven — that is the work of months and 
years, of a whole lifetime," we declare. . . . 
But the volcano that the chemistry of years 
has been preparing breaks into eruption in an 
hour. The blossom that the patient plant 
has been designing for a century bursts into 
flower in a single night. And so the reconcili- 
ation of a soul to God, which it has been the 
labor of the ages to make possible, which 
dates for its conception back to the dateless 
time when the Lamb was slain from the foun- 
dation of the world, comes to its completion 
in the sudden meeting of a soul filled with 
penitence and a God filled with mercy. 

VII. 184. 

As to Thy last Apostle's heart 

Thy lightning glance did then impart 

Zeal's never-dying fire, 
So teach us on Thy shrine to lay 
Our hearts, and let them day by day 

Intenser blaze and higher. Keble. 



26 JANUARY 26. 

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every 
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 

Matt. iv. 4. 



MAN is represented as feeding on the words 
of God, and every word of God must 
come for nurture to the life that is made up 
of many parts. How splendid the figure is! 
God . . . speaks once: "Let the earth bring 
forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the 
fruit-tree yielding fruit." And as He spoke, 
those words, "proceeding out of the mouth 
of the Lord," were caught by the quick, obe- 
dient ground of Genesis, and became the power 
by which the physical life of man in all his 
generations has been nourished. . . . Again, 
He speaks out of some Sinai mountain, or 
out of that Sinai of the inner life, our con- 
science. "Do this," He says, "and live," 
laying down duty after duty, which the moral 
nature takes to itself and feeds upon, and 
grows by them into rectitude and strength. 
And then, last of all, to the highest life of 
all, He utters His sublimest voice. What shall 
we say that last word is by which He utters 
Himself to, on which He feeds, man's deep 
religious nature ? What can it be but that 
eternal " Word" which was in the beginning 
with God, which was God, which was made 
flesh, and dwelt among us; that bread of life 
which came down from heaven, of which a man 
may eat and never d : the fulness of divine 
utterance in the world's Saviour, Jesus Christ ? 

VII. 155, 156. 



JANUARY 27. 27 



THE real life, what is it ? Is it the wretched, 
* sordid details of earthly living, unin- 
spired by a single suggestion that in their mud 
and mire there are the seeds of any spiritual, 
transcendent fruit or flower ? On the other 
hand, is the real life a vision of some expe- 
rience beyond the stars which has no connec- 
tion with the dreariness and degradation of 
many of the mortal conditions which it has 
passed through and left behind ? Not so. 
The real life of a man is his highest attainment 
kept in perpetual association with the meanest 
and commonest experience out of which it has 
been fed. When men shall so write and paint 
the lives of one another, then we shall have 
the true realism, — a realism in which, to use 
the Psalmist's words, " Truth shall flourish 
out of the earth and Righteousness look down 
from Heaven." 

VI. 226. 

Natural things 
And spiritual; — who separates these two 
In art, in morals, or the social drift, 
Tears up the bond of nature, and brings 

death . . . 
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, 
Is wrong, in short, at *y '.points. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 



28 JANUARY 28. 

For we can do nothing against the truth, but for 
the truth. — 2 Cor. xiii. 8. 



THERE is an absolute truth about every- 
thing, something which is certainly the 
fact about that thing, entirely independent of 
what you or I or any man may think about it. 
No man on earth may know that fact correctly 
— but the fact exists. It lies behind all blunders 
and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, un- 
found certainty, like the great sea beneath its 
waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. 
God knows it. It and the possession of it 
makes the eternal difference between God's 
knowledge and man's. 

It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man 
thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, 
unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely ex- 
istent behind and at the heart of everything. 
It is a terrible thing when a man ceases to be- 
lieve in it, and ceases to seek for it. 

VI. 210. 

Seek, then, now, O my soul, so singular and 

so supereminent a Good. 
As long as thou art in the flesh, cease not to 

seek; 
Since that can never be sought enough, which 
can never be grasped to the full. 

Thomas a Kempis. 

Jesus saith unto him, I am . . . the Truth, 

John xiv. 6. 



JANUARY 29. 29 

CONSIDER what would be the idea of 
Christ and His relation to the world 
which we should get if this were all we knew 
of Him, — if He as yet had told us nothing of 
Himself but what is wrapped up in these rich 
and simple words, " I am the Light of the 
World," "I am the Light of Life." They 
send us instantly abroad into the world of 
Nature. They set us on the hill-top watching 
the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They 
show us the great plain flooded and beaten 
and quivering with the noon-day sun. They 
hush and elevate us w T ith the mystery and 
sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening's 
glow. There could be no image so abundant 
in its meaning; no fact plucked from the world 
of Nature could have such vast variety of truth 
to tell; and yet one meaning shines out from 
the depth of the figure and irradiates all its 
messages. They all are true by its truth. 
What is that meaning ? It is the essential 
richness and possibility of the world and its 
essential belonging to the sun. 

V. 2. 



O only Lord God, Father of lights and Maker of dark- 
ness, send forth Thy light and Thy truth that they may 
lead us through dimness of things seen to clarity of things 
unseen : For our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, the Light of 
the world. Amen. 

Christina Rossetti. 



3 o JANUARY 30. 

/ am the Light of the world. — John viii. 12. 

A THOUSAND subtle, mystic miracles of 
deep and intricate relationship between 
Christ and humanity must be enfolded in those 
words; but over and behind and within all 
other meanings, it means this,— the essential 
richness and possibility of humanity and its es- 
sential belonging to Divinity. . . . The truth 
is that every higher life to which man comes, 
and especially the highest life in Christ, is in 
the true line of man's humanity; there is no 
transportation to a foreign region. There is 
the quickening and fulfilling of what man by 
the very essence of his nature is. The more 
man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the 
more, not the less, truly he is man. The fullest 
Christian experience is simply the fullest life. 
To enter into it therefore is nowise strange. 
The wonder and the unnaturalness is that any 
child of God should live outside of it, and so 
in all his life should never be himself. 

V. 4, 6. 



'Tis He, as none other can, 

Makes free the spirit of man, 

And speaks, in darkest night, 

One word of awful light 

That strikes through the dreadful pain 

Of life a reason sane — 

That word divine which brought 

The universe from nought. 

Richard Watson Gilder. 



JANUARY 31. 31 



There is no power but of God. — Rom. xiii. 1. 

"\T7HERE does the power come from?" 
VV is the natural question always when 
we are watching any strong effect. " Where 
did it begin?" we curiously ask as we stand 
by the side of any process and watch its steady 
flow. . . . Such search for the seats of origi- 
nal power is among the first instincts and the 
keenest pleasures of the human mind. And 
when such a source of power is found, then 
the human soul bows down before it and pours 
out its reverence. All idolatry is merely the 
giving to some secondary cause that virtue 
and regard which can belong only to the High- 
est and First Cause: to worship the sun in- 
stead of the God who makes him shine; to 
deify a hero or sage into the place of the God 
who makes him brave or wise; to glorify an 
abstract virtue until it sits cloudily in the 
place of the distinct personal God in whose 
nature all virtue has its being — these are the 
great types in which idolatry has prevailed 
among mankind. And to-day the man who is 
looking to his money or his education or his 
good. repute or his family for the satisfaction 
and the culture which God gives us through 
them all, but which neither of them gives us 
of and by itself, he is the modern idolater. 
He, like all the idolaters of old, has cut the 
channels of life off from the source of life, 
and sits with his thirsty lips pressed to their 
dry mouths, getting no real refreshment, how- 
ever he may delude himself. vil. 35, 36. 

These are wells without water. — 2 Pet. ii. 17. 



32 FEBRUARY i. 



To be spiritually minded is life and peace. 

Rom. viii. 6. 

" T HAVE no spiritual capacity," says one. 
1 "It is not in me to be a saint," another 
cries. "I have a covetous soul. I cannot 
live except in winning money." " I can make 
many sacrifices, but I cannot give up my 
drink." " I can do many things, but I cannot 
be reverent." So the man talks about him- 
self. Poor creature, does he think that he 
knows, down to its centre, this wonderful 
humanity of his ? It all sounds so plausible and 
is so untrue! . . . How can he know what 
lurking power lies packed away within the 
never-opened folds of this inactive life ? Has 
he ever dared to call himself the child of God, 
and for one moment felt what that involves ? 
Has he ever attacked the task which demands 
those powers whose existence he denies, or 
tried to press on into the region where those 
evil things cannot breathe which he compla- 
cently declares are an inseparable portion of 
his life ? VI. 6 9 . 

Oh, there are heavenly heights to reach 

In many a fearful place 
Where the poor timid heir of God 

Lies blindly on his face, — 

Lies languishing for light divine, 

That he shall never see 
Till he go forward at Thy sign, 

And trust himself to Thee. 

Whittier. 



FEBRUARY 2. 33 



And the Child grew ', and waxed strong in spirit, 
filled with wisdom ; and the grace of God was 
upon him. — Luke ii. 40. 

"THE evident design of God's creation, the 
* comprehensive form of the incarnation, 
the clear presence in children of the power of 
and the need of religion, these are the forces 
which, in spite of every tendency of the 
grown people to make children wait till they 
grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a 
trust, however blind, that a child's religion 
was a possible reality; that a child might serve 
and love and live for God. . . . His are the 
years when one can really believe in ideals. 
God can stand out before him, awful, yet 
dear. . . . No doubt of God's faithfulness, no 
questioning of His ways comes in to cloud the 
perfectly unspotted adoration. How good it 
is that there are years at the beginning of every 
life when it is the most easy thing to believe 
in absolute right and goodness! 

IV. 136, 137. 

How good a thing is feeling — admiration ! It is the 
bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and sera- 
phim. 

Am 1 el. 



34 FEBRUARY 3. 

MAN never is sent into the world, and bid- 
den to evolve out of his own being the 
conditions in which he is to live. Always 
there is something before him. . . . The food 
is before the hunger, and says, "I have waited 
for you to come." The river is before the 
thirst. Beauty was in the sky and on the hills 
before the eye was fashioned. Music was 
breathing on the winds before the ear was 
framed. Fragrance was in the violet and the 
forest before the nostrils came to catch its 
odor. The picture was before the imagi- 
nation which discerned it; the sea before the 
ship that sailed it. Man finds the rocks 
waiting with their problems, frost and heat 
holding their inspiration and their comfort in 
expectation, of his coming. And he never 
says, "Here I am," that the servants do not 
stand in ranks at the door of his great home- 
stead to welcome the heir into his own, and 
to pledge him their obedient service. The 
material is background for the spiritual, — the 
earth, which is body, for man, who is soul. 

V. 41. 



For us the winds do blow; 
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and foun- 
tains flow. 
Nothing we see but means our good, 

As our delight, or as our treasure: 
The whole is either our cupboard of food, 

Or cabinet of pleasure. 

George Herbert. 



FEBRUARY 4. 35 

To whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life. — John vi. 68. 

IF a soul has many doubts and bewilderments 
about Christ, and yet knows that there is 
a Saviour, and that that Saviour's home is in 
the land of righteousness and truth, then to 
that land of righteousness and truth that soul 
will go by any road that it can find, eager to 
get there, seeking a road, pressing through 
difficulties, that it may be in the same country 
with, and somewhere near, its unfound Lord. 
It may be that the clouds that for us mortals 
haunt that land of righteousness and truth 
may long hang so thick and low that living 
close to Him the soul may still fail to see Him, 
but some day certainly the fog shall rise, the 
cloud shall scatter, and in the perfect enlight- 
enment of the other life the soul shall see its 
Lord, and be thankful for every darkest step 
that it took towards Him here. 

VI. 150. 



I felt like one upon his journey brought 

By ways he knows not of; these pathways 

dim 
Had ever seemed their promised end to cheat, 

Yet had they led to Him 
In whom life's tangled, broken threads com- 
plete 
Are gathered up, its wasted things made meet 
For holier use, its roughness smoothed, its bit- 
ter turned to sweet. 

Dora Greenwell. 



36 FEBRUARY 5. 

Come and see. — John i. 46. 

EVERYWHERE this invitation rings 
through the world. True, the sight which 
we send out in answer to the invitation must 
be the large use of all our faculties. Not 
merely the outward eye must see, the mind 
must see as well. It is not answering the 
whole invitation unless the whole man goes 
and sees with all his powers of vision. The 
eye sees phenomena; the soul sees causes un- 
derlying and connecting the phenomena. We 
must not stop merely with what the eye sees, 
and, having written down the facts we have 
discovered, call that the all of science, and 
brand all beyond as superstition. It is not 
superstition, not prejudice, but science still, 
spiritual science, when the mind sees a causal 
will, out of which all phenomena proceed, and 
the heart feels a mighty love beating through 
all the ordered system. It is not well to live 
and see only from the eyes and brain outward. 

VI. 138. 



Look down in pity, Lord, we pray, 
On eyes oppressed by moral night, 

And touch the darkened lids, and say 

The gracious words, " Receive thy sight! " 

Then in clear daylight, shall we see 
Where walks the sinless Son of God; 

And, aided by new strength from Thee, 
Press onward in the path He trod. 

Bryant. 



FEBRUARY 6. 37 

We love Hi7?i because He first loved us. 

1 John iv. 19. 

TO know that long before I cared for Him, 
He cared for me; that while I wandered 
up and down in carelessness, perhaps while I 
was plunging deep in flagrant sin, God's eye 
was never off me for a moment, He was always 
watching for the instant when His hand might 
touch me and His voice might speak to me, — 
there is nothing which can appeal to a man 
like that. The man is stone whom that does 
not appeal to. When, touched by the knowl- 
edge of that untiring love, a man gives himself 
at last to God, every act of loving service 
which he does afterwards is fired and colored 
by the power of gratitude, surprised gratitude, 
out of which it springs. How shall he over- 
take this love which has so much the start of 
him ? This is what makes his service eager 
and enthusiastic. It is a ' ' reasonable service, ' ' 
justified by the sublime reason of the soul 
which loves its God because He first loved it. 

V. 54. 

Because Thy love hath sought me, 
All mine is Thine, and Thine is mine; 

Because Thy love hath bought me, 
I will not be mine own, but Thine. 

I lift my heart for Thy heart, — 

Thy heart sole resting-place for mine: 

Shall Thy heart crave for my heart, 

And shall not mine crave back for Thine ? 
Christina Rossetti. 



38 FEBRUARY 7. 

Let the peace of God rule in your hearts. 

Col. iii. 15. 

T^HAT peace cannot come in this life, you 
* say. But I do not know. There have 
been men and women with lives so calm and 
high that they seemed to have reached it, even 
on this tumultuous earth. Hardly a flake of 
spray from the storm below them ever seemed 
to dash up and wet their steadfast and placid 
feet. But whether it can come in this life or 
not, the struggle for it makes the two lives 
one. Already to him who is working towards 
it, part of its peace is given. The rock runs 
out under the sea, and your feet may be firm 
upon it even while the waves are still breast 
high. 

Such be the peace in Christ which shall 
make all of our lives strong through all their 
struggle, until at last we enter into that rest 
which remaineth for the people of God. 

VI. 127. 

No clouds of care that gather, 

No waves of sin that toss, 
No blasts of desolation, 

No blight, no strife, no loss, 
Shall break the mystic circle 

Of that enshrining peace 
Which round the steadfast spirit 

Doth grow, and doth not cease. 

J. L. M. W. 



FEBRUARY 8. 39 

WHAT is it in the highest sense to do what 
all men try to do in some sense, to get 
a living ? Those words are very lightly used, 
and narrowed down to very insignificant 
dimensions. . . . 

Breathing is not life, thought is not life, 
duty is not life. The perfect life includes 
them all. No man is thoroughly, that is, 
through and through, alive unless from end 
to end of his capacity that capacity is full. 
Complete life involves the conception of a 
body with every power perfect, a mind with 
every ability active, a conscience that never 
swerves from purity, a spirit that reaches to 
and fastens itself on God. Everything short 
of that is stagnated, impeded, partial life. 
To complete that high result is what a man 
ought to mean when he talks about "getting 
a living." Is it not one of the mortifying 
things, dear friends, to take now and then 
these words that we are using every day so 
lightly and see how much they really mean; 
to wipe through the dust and rust that are on 
these coin-words, which constant friction has 
worn so smooth and unimpressive, and look 
upon the royal image and superscription that 
is on them ? VII. 152, 154. 

There is no end to the sky, 

And the stars are everywhere, 
And time is eternity, 

And the here is over there; 
For the common deeds of the common day 
Are ringing bells in the far-away. 

Henry Burton. 



4 o FEBRUARY 9. 

A LL history of man bears witness that man, 
** though himself finite, demands infinity 
to deal with and to rest upon. What truly 
enthusiastically human man will tolerate the 
drawing of any line, however far away, out- 
side of which he shall be bound to believe 
that human enterprise shall never go ? Who 
will let any limit mark for him the certain 
boundary beyond which no yet more wonder- 
ful invention shall be devised, and no yet more 
beautiful miracle of art flower out of the rich 
ground of man's exhaustless fancy ? What 
man ever truly loves and sets a limit, con- 
sciously and absolutely, to the loveliness of 
that which he is loving ? The love that de- 
fines the limits of its idol's loveliness is not 
entire love; pure love lives in its power of 
idealizing, and loves the infinite in the finite 
type to which it gives its homage. So every- 
where there comes the testimony of this end- 
less reach of man after the infinite, and of 
his inability to rest upon anything less. 

III. 120. 



The saints' good days 
Are good, because the good Lord lays 
No bound of shore along the sea 
Of beautiful Eternity. 

Helen Hunt Jackson. 



FEBRUARY 10. 41 

A peasant may believe as much 

As a great clerk, and reach the highest stat- 
ure: 
Thus dost Thou make proud knowledge bend 
and crouch, 
While grace fills up uneven nature. 

George Herbert. 

NO man grows good by mere increase of' in- 
tellectual development. Look at the 
melancholy record of the private lives of 
many of the most brilliant thinkers and schol- 
ars. Look at the dissoluteness of the bad, 
bright times of Greek or Roman culture. . . . 
As powerless as is the mere training of the 
body to educate the mind, or the culture of 
the mind to reform the morals, so utterly hope- 
less is it that any man living under God's in- 
evitable laws should grow by the mere strug- 
gle of moral rectitude into that condition of 
resemblance and spiritual nearness to God 
which we mean when we speak of a man's 
being holy. That high estate, the abiding of 
the divine life in the human soul — you must 
set it down as the first truth of your religion 
— can be ever reached only by the personal 
acceptance of that means by which it was first 
and forever typified — the indwelling of the 
Divine in the human in the great representa- 
tive miracle of spiritual history, the Incarna- 
tion of Jesus Christ. VII. 157. 

I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ, 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 

Browning. 



42 FEBRUARY n. 



So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be 
judged by the law of liberty. — James ii. 12. 

THE freeing of souls is the judging of souls. 
A liberated nature dictates its own des- 
tiny. . . . Look at Christ, and see [this truth] 
in perfection. His was the freest life man ever 
lived. Nothing could bind Him. He walked 
across old Jewish traditions and they snapped 
like cobwebs. He acted upon the divinity that 
was in Him up to the noblest ideal of liberty. 
But was there no compulsion in His working ? 
Hear Him: " I must be about my Father's busi- 
ness.' ' Was it no compulsion that drove Him 
those endless journeys, footsore and heartsore, 
through His ungrateful land ? " I must work 
to-day." What slave of sin was ever driven to 
his wickedness as Christ was to holiness ? What 
force ever drove a selfish man into his voluptu- 
ous indulgence with half the irresistibility that 
forced the Saviour to the cross? O my dear 
friends, who does not dream for himself of a 
freedom as complete and as inspiring as the 
Lord's ? Who does not pray that he too may 
be ruled by such a sweet despotic law of 
liberty ? II. i 97 , i Q 8. 

O voice of Duty, still 

Speak forth: I hear with awe; 

In thee I own the sovereign Will, 
Obey the sovereign law. 

Thou higher voice of Love! 

Yet speak thy word in me; 
Through Duty let me upward move 

To thy pure liberty! 

Samuel Longfellow. 



FEBRUARY 12. 43 

Abraham Lincoln born, 1809. 

r^ REAT men are in the world what the most 
^-*- enlightened and exalted experiences are 
in the life of any man. They are the mountain- 
tops on which the influences which are after- 
ward to fertilize our whole humanity have 
birth. There stands out some great pattern of 
unselfishness; some martyr-life which totally 
forgets itself and lives in suffering self-sacrifice 
for fellow-men. About that man's life gathers 
an utterance, an exhibition, of the glory of self- 
sacrifice — of how it is the true life of mankind, 
of how in it alone man becomes truly man. 
Does all that abide in him, live and die in his 
single personality ? Does it disappear forever 
in the withering flames which consume him at 
the stake ? Does not that fire set it free, cast 
it forth into the atmosphere of the universal 
human nature, and make it the possession of 
all mankind ? Have not you and I the power 
to live more unselfishly to-day because of the 
unselfishness of the great monumental lives 
of devotion ? 

VII. 344. 

As thrills of long-hushed tone 
Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine 
With keen vibrations from the touch divine 

Of noble natures gone. 

James Russell Lowell. 



44 FEBRUARY 13. 

Heroes are the mortal pipes 

Thorough which God's breath doth blow; 
Little care they how they strain 

If aright the tune doth go. J. L. M. W. 

IDEALITY, magnanimity, and bravery, — 
these are what make the heroes. These 
are what glorify certain lives that stand 
through history as the lights and beacons of 
mankind. The materialist, the sceptic, and 
the coward, he cannot be a hero. We talk 
sometimes about the unheroic character of 
modern life. We point to our luxurious living 
for the reason. But, oh, my friends, it is not in 
your costly houses and your sumptuous tables 
that your unheroic lives consist. It is in the 
absence of great inspiring ideas, of generous 
enthusiasms, and of the courage of self-forget- 
fulness. . . . Do not blame a mere accident 
for that which lies so much deeper. There are 
moments, when you bear your sorrows, when 
you resist a great temptation, when your faith 
or your country is in danger, — there are such 
moments with you all when you seize the idea 
of human living and are made generous and 
brave because of it. Then, for all your modern 
dress, for all your modern parlor where you 
stand, you are heroic like David, like Paul, 
like any of God's knights in any of the ages 
which are most remote and picturesque. Then 
you catch some glimpse of a region into which 
you might enter, and where, with no blast of 
trumpets or waving of banners, you might 
be heroic all the time. 

II. 173. 



FEBRUARY 14. 45 

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled. 

Matt. v. 6. 

THE essence of every beatitude is in the 
human heart, and yet the human heart 
loves to hear the utterance of the beatitudes 
from the mouth of God as if they were His 
arbitrary enactments. I know by that of the 
nature of God which is in me as His child, 
that they which hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness shall certainly be filled. I am sure, 
by that subtle knowledge of Him which the 
child must have of the Father, that He could 
not leave a really longing soul unsatisfied in 
all His world. That importunate happiness, 
ready to give itself away, must pour itself into 
every ready life. 

VIII. 32. 

There's not a craving in the mind 
Thou dost not meet and still; 

There's not a wish the heart can have 
Which Thou dost not fulfil. 

All things that have been, all that are, 
All things that can be dreamed, 

All possible creations, made, 
Kept faithful, or redeemed, — 

All these may draw upon Thy power, 

Thy mercy may command; 
And still outflows Thy silent sea, 

Immutable and grand. 

Faber. 



46 FEBRUARY 15. 

Behold, what tnannei' of love the Father hath 
bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons 
of God. — 1 John iii. 1. 

THERE is a deeper nature which belongs to 
every one of us as a child of God. . . . 
The man who lives in that deeper nature, the 
man who believes himself the son of God, 
is not surprised at his best moments and his 
noblest inspirations. He is not amazed when 
he does a brave or an unselfish thing. He 
is amazed at himself when he is a coward 
or a liar. He accepts self-restraint only as 
a temporary condition, an immediate neces- 
sity of life. Not self-restraint, but self-indul- 
gence, the free, unhindered utterance of the 
deepest nature, which is good — that is the only 
final picture of man's duty which he tolerates. 
And all the life is one; the specially and spe- 
cifically religious part being but the point at 
which the diamond for the moment shines, 
with all the diamond nature waiting in reserve 
through the whole substance of the precious 

stone. 

V. 20. 

Take all in a word: the trust in God's breast 
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed; 
Though He be so bright and we so dim, 
We are made in His image to witness Him. 

Browning. 



FEBRUARY 16. 47 

A STRONG, unalterable persuasion that 
** God is merciful and kind has been poured 
onto your life, into your mind. That fact it- 
self, once known, absorbs your contemplation. 
You would sit lonely in the empty world and fill 
your soul with gazing on the brightness of that 
truth. So you do sit to-day when there comes 
some sort of appeal from fellow-men. . . . 
Somehow the cry awakens you, and you go 
down and put your truth into your brother's 
hands. At first it seems almost a profanation. 
The truth is so sacred and seems so thoroughly 
your own. But as you give it to your brother, 
new lights come out in it. For God to be good 
means something more when the goodness 
turns to new forms of blessing in the new need 
of this new life. O you who think you know 
that God is merciful because of the mercy 
which He has shewed to you, be sure there is a 
richness in your truth which you have not 
reached yet, which you will never reach until 
you let Him make your life the interpreter of 
His goodness to some other soul! 

IV. 15. 

A toil that gains with what it yields, 
And scatters to its own increase, 

And hears, while sowing outward fields, 
The harvest-song of inward peace. 

Whittier. 



48 FEBRUARY 17. 

The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich. 

Prov. x. 22. 

VOU say, How can I believe in God ? Only 
* by coming close to God, and learning by 
deep and sweet experience that He has better 
things to give to His beloved than what men 
call prosperity, — the peace that passeth un- 
derstanding, the calm rest of forgiven sin, and 
of a soul trusted away from itself into its 
Saviour's hands. To one who knows what 
those high blessings mean, how little does it 
seem that other hands should fill themselves 
with the shining trifles which its hands are too 
full to hold. Think how it will seem in heaven! 
Standing before the throne, filled with the un- 
speakable vision, conscious through all the 
glory of the culture that suffering has brought, 
hurrying with joy on the high missions of the 
Lord, who will look back then and be troubled 
an instant at the recollection of how a wicked 
man sat at a little richer table, or had a little 
higher seat in the market-place when we were 

here on earth ? 

VI. 126. 

Lose the less joy that doth but blind; 
Reach forth a larger bliss to find. 
To-day is brief; the inclusive spheres 
Rain raptures of a thousand years. 

Adeline D. T. Whitney. 



FEBRUARY 18. 49 

CONSECRATIONS of our lives to others 
are often not less real and powerful 
because they are unconscious. . . . We have 
gone on with our work in life, thinking that 
the purpose of our work was centred in our- 
selves. . . . But some day a friend died — one 
who was very near to us, one in whom our life 
was bound up in many ways. Who has not 
known the dreadful going out of all the in- 
terest of living at the time of such a death ? 
It seemed as if there were nothing left to live 
for. . . . It was terrible. But it was blessed 
if you did not stop there, but, with persistent 
love that would not be satisfied until it found 
the object it had lost, you traced the precious 
life on as it left you, till you followed it into 
the very bosom of the God who took it, and 
poured out there the treasures of devotion 
which had no longer any one dear enough to 
tempt them on the earth. 

VI. 48, 49- 



And, dearer than the living ones that dwell 

Beyond the throbbing sea, — 
And dearer than the Dead, whose voices swell 

The heavenly melody, — 
One visiteth His people in the night, 
Who giveth songs, and makes the darkness 
bright. 

B. M. 



50 FEBRUARY 19. 

NOTHING is more sad than the way in 
which we comfort ourselves and one an- 
other for our sorrows, by vague, unrealized 
promises that sorrow cannot last forever. 

We conceive of life as a great swinging 
sphere which must forever run a vast orbit, 
doomed to perpetual change, and so sure by 
and by to sweep into the sunlight, if we can 
only keep alive and wait. It is a forlorn and 
miserable comfort. It loses all the certain- 
ty and personal graciousness of Christianity. 
There is no piety about it. . . . David's pil- 
grims going through the vale of misery " use 
it " for a well. . . . It was not simply a sorrow 
that was succeeded by joy, not merely a peace 
promised and looked for and waited for, it 
was a peace found. When they grew thirsty 
they looked, not merely farther on into the 
heart of the future, but deeper down into the 
bosom of the present. 

VI. 23, 24. 



Some narrow hearts there are 
That suffer blight when that they fed upon 
As something to complete their being fails; 
And they retire into their holds and pine, 
And, long restrained, grow stern. But some 

there are 
That in a sacred want and hunger rise, 
And draw the misery home and live with it, 
And excellent in honor wait, and will 
That something good should yet be found in it, 
Or wherefore were they born ? 

Jean Ingelow. 



FEBRUARY 20. 51 

TTOW to secure humility is one of the hard 
* * problems of all s) T stems of dut) T . ... It 
is the oneness of the soul's life with God's 
life thai: at once makes us try to be like Him 
and brings forth our unlikeness to Him. It is 
the source at once of aspiration and humility. 
The more aspiration, the more humility. Hu- 
mility comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian 
history, it has been the souls which most looked 
up that were the humblest souls; if the Chris- 
tian man keeps his soul full of the sense of 
littleness, even in all his hardest work for 
Christ, not by denying his own stature, but 
by standing up at his whole height, and then 
looking up in love and aw 7 e and seeing God 
tower in infinitude above him, — certainly all 
this stamps the morality which is wrought out 
with the idea of Jesus with this singular es- 
sence, that it has solved the problem of faith- 
fulness and pride, and made possible humility 
by aspiration. 

VIII. 66. 



All service should be done for Thee 
In meek humility 

And awe most sweet, 
That Thou shouldst take, 
E'en for Thy Son Christ Jesus' sake, 

Service from servants so unmeet. 

Anna E. Hamilton. 



52 FEBRUARY 21. 

Whatsoever a man sowetk, that shall he also 
reap. — Gal. vi. 7. 

He which soweth sparingly shall reap also spar- 
ingly ; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap 
also bountifully, — 2 Cor. ix. 6. 

THE world seems to be a great field in which 
* every man drops his seed, and which 
gives back to every man, not just the same 
thing which he dropped there, any more than 
the brown earth holds up to you in the autumn 
the same blackberry which you hid under its 
bosom in the spring, but something which has 
its true correspondence and proportion to the 
seed to which it is the legitimate and natural 
reply. Every gift has its return, every act 
has its consequence, every call has its answer 
in this great live, alert world, where man stands 
central, and all things have their eyes on Him 
and their ears open to His voice. III. 265. 

Sow truth if thou the truth wouldst reap; 

Who sows the false shall reap the vain; 
Erect and sound thy conscience keep; 

From hollow deeds and words refrain. 

Sow love, and taste its fruitage pure; 

Sow peace, and reap its harvest bright; 
Sow sunbeams on the rock and moor, 

And find a harvest-home of light. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



FEBRUARY 22. 53 

Great Truths are portions of the soul of man; 

Great souls are portions of eternity; 
Each drop of blood that e'er through true 
heart ran 

With lofty message, ran for thee and me. 

IT is the great patriots that interpret the 
value of their country to the common cit- 
izen. The man absorbed in his own small 
affairs, or so restricted in his power of thought 
that he would never have taken in the national 
idea for himself abstractly, sees how Wash- 
ington and Webster and Lincoln loved the 
land; and through their love for it, its worthi- 
ness of his own love becomes made known to 
him. Still his love for his country, when it is 
awakened, is his own, and may impel him to 
serve her in most peculiar personal ways, very 
different from theirs, but none the less it is 
true that but for the interpretation of these 
great men's honor for her, he would have hon- 
ored his country less or not at all. They in- 
terpret to their fellow-men what God has first 
interpreted to them, till ultimately the fire 
which starts from the central heart of all 
runs through the world, and the blindest are 
enlightened to discern, and the most timid be- 
come bold enough to praise, the movement 
which at first had no friend but God. 

V. 328, 338. 

And shall w T e praise ? God's praise was his 

before; 
And on our futile laurels he looks down, 
Himself our bravest crown! 

James Russell Lowell. 



54 FEBRUARY 23. 

Great peace have they which love Thy law. 

Ps. cxix. 165. 

A RE you at peace with yourself ? If your 
**• will is taking your powers, which were 
made to do noble and gentle and generous 
things, and forcing them to do sordid and 
brutal and mean things; if you are living a 
life of miserable drudgery, treating yourself 
like a machine; or if you are living a life of 
dissipation, treating yourself like a brute, then 
you are not at peace with yourself surely. 
Yourself is misusing, is abusing yourself. . . . 
A man is both harp and harper. The harp 
may not complain, but all the time the music 
it was meant to make sleeps in its strings; and 
it cannot be at peace with the cruel fingers 
that make it unmusical. And in your powers 
sleeps the nobleness that they were made to 
do, in everlasting protest against the wicked- 
ness to which you compel them. O my dear 
friends, to be at peace with ourselves is not to 
loosely approve ourselves in what we are. It 
is to work with ourselves, that we may be all 

that God made us for. 

VI. 194. 

" Couldst thou in vision see 

Thyself the man God meant, 
Thou never more wouldst be 
The man thou art — content/ 9 



FEBRUARY 24. 55 

Of these meii which have companied with us, . . . 
must one be 7' darned to be a witness with us of 
His resurrection. . . . And the lot fell upon 
Matthias. — Acts i. 22, 26. 

TTOWEVER the Gospel may be capable of 
* * statement in dogmatic form, its truest 
statement we know is not in dogma but in per- 
sonal life. ... So I think a man's best ser- 
mon is the best utterance of his life. ... If 
it is really God's message through him, it 
brings him out in a way that no other expe- 
rience of his life has power to do, as the 
quality of the trumpet declares itself more 
clearly when the strong man blows a blast 
for battle through it than when a child whis- 
pers into it in play. Remember this: . . . 
then, when you hear your brother preach, 
honor the work that he is doing and listen as 
reverently as you can to hear through him 
some voice of God. . . . He is the mes- 
senger of Christ to the soul of man always. 

XI. 27, 135, 140. 

O Almighty God, who didst choose Thy faithful servant 
Matthias to take part in the ministry and apostleship from 
which Judas by transgression fell ; Grant that Thy Church, 
preserved from false Apostles, may ever be blessed with 
faithful Ministers of Thy word and sacraments ; through 
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Mexican Provisional Offices. 



56 FEBRUARY 25. 

As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, 
that they also may be one in us. — John xvii. 21. 

WHO can read words like these and not 
catch sight of what it was that was to 
fill these disciples' lives with energy, and to 
be the atmosphere wherein their new goodness 
should get all its growth? God's fatherhood 
made visible to them in Christ, His Son; their 
sonship to God made visible in Christ, their 
brother. It was as if at the beginning of all 
ages down which their Christian life has run, 
they lay, like Jacob on the night when he went 
out to his new life from his father's home, and 
to them, as to him, a ladder seems to stretch 
up into heaven, and the angels of God ascend- 
ed and descended on it, — the angels of duty 
bringing God's strength to men, and carrying 
men's obedience to God, on the ladder of the 
fatherhood and sonship that bound the heav- 
ens to the earth, set up in the new Beth-el, 
the new House of God, which was the life of 
Jesus. 

VIII. 60. 

By eyes that are pure and hearts that are clean, 
At morn and at eve is a Ladder still seen: 
And the angels still come, and the angels still 

go 
To the hands lifted up, from the- heads bended 

low, 
With the blessings He gives and the thanks 

that we say, 
With the grace that we need and the worship 

we pay. 

J. L. M. W. 



FEBRUARY 26. 57 

O YOUNG disciples, whatever other kind 
of falseness to your faith you may fall 
into, may you be saved at least from ever 
being ashamed of it. It is the noblest, the 
divinest, thing on earth. You may have only 
got hold of the very borders of it, but if in any 
true sense you can say, " Jesus is the Lord," 
you have set foot into the region wherein man 
lives his completest life. Go on, without one 
thought or dream of turning back, and w r ith 
no shamefaced hiding of the new mastery under 
which you are trying to live. If your Chris- 
tian service is too small in its degree for you 
to boast of, it is too precious in its kind for 
you to be ashamed of. Go on forever craving 
and forever winning more faith and obedience, 
and so learning more and more forever that 
faith and obedience are the glory and crown 

of human life. 

VI. 100. 



Life may be given in many ways, 
And loyalty to Truth be sealed 

As bravely in the closet as the field, 
So bountiful is fate; 
But then to stand beside her, 
When craven churls deride her, 

To front a lie in arms and not to yield, 
This shows, methinks, God's plan 
And measure of a stalwart man. 

James Russell Lowell. 



58 FEBRUARY 27. 

HOW in a time like this can a man live and 
get the best out of it, and at the same 
time shun its worst? Here in this time of un- 
certainties, here in this wandering transition 
age, we are to live, whether we will or no. . . . 
And what can one do with his own personal 
life to keep it from complete confusion, and, if 
it be possible, to make it grow strong and 
rich and true, out of these very circumstances 
which, perhaps, we hopelessly deplore ? „ . . 
Above all things, there is the strength and per- 
manence of religion. Never was there such a 
time for a man to cling to that. " Ah, but," 
you say, "that is the most uncertain of all 
things ! What is more unsettled than relig- 
ion ? " But no, my friends. . . . The knowl- 
edge that love is at the root of everything; the 
answer of the human soul to the appealing 
nature and life of Jesus Christ; the value of 
the soul above the body, of the character 
above the circumstances; and the eternal 
life, — these are what men may cling to. If 
any man does cling to these, he is really upon 
a rock, and whatever else which he thought 
was rock may prove to be ice and melt away, 
here he is safe. Here is the great, last cer- 
tainty. Be sure of God. With simple, loving 
worship, by continual obedience, by purifying 
yourself even as He is pure, creep close, keep 
close to Him. I. 172, 173. 

With Thee our souls in peace abide; 
In Thee heaven's childhood we begin; 
Thy kingdom we shall enter in, 
Not pure, but purified. 

Lucy Larcom, 



FEBRUARY 28. 59 



Then Jesus took unto Him the twelve, and said 
unto them, Behold, zue go up to Jerusalem, and all 
things that are written concerning the Son of man 
shall be accomplished. — Luke xviii. 30. 

AND so every true life has its Jerusalem to 
which it is always going up. At first 
far off and dimly seen, laying but light hold 
upon our purpose and our will, then gradually 
taking us more and more into its power, com- 
pelling our study, directing the current of our 
thoughts, arranging our friendships for us, de- 
ciding for us what powers we shall bring out 
into use, deciding for us what we shall be. . . . 
You stop the student at his books, the philan- 
thropist at his committee, the saint at his 
prayers. You say to each of them, "What 
does it all mean ? What are you doing ? What 
is it all for ? " And the answer is everywhere 
the same : " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem." 
We draw back the vail of history, and every- 
where it is the same picture that we see. 
Companies, great and small, climbing moun- 
tains to where sacred cities stand awaiting 
them with open gates upon the top. The man 
who is going up to no Jerusalem is but the 
ghost and relic of a man. He has in him no 
genuine and healthy human life. 

IV. 317. 



Yea, very vain 
The greatest speed of all these souls of men, 
Unless they travel upward to Thy throne ! 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 



6o MARCH i. 



Whose high endeavors are an inward light 
That makes the path before him always 

bright; . . . 
Who, doomed to go in company with pain, 
Turns his necessity to glorious gain. 

Wordsworth. 

IF the life which you have chosen to be your 
life is really worthy of you, it involves 
self-sacrifice and pain. If your Jerusalem 
really is your sacred city, there is certainly 
across in it. What then ? Shall you flinch 
and draw back ? Shall you ask for yourself 
another life ? O no, not another life, but 
another self. Ask to be born again. Ask 
God to fill you with Himself, and then calmly 
look up and go on. Go up to Jerusalem ex- 
pecting all things that are written concerning 
you to be fulfilled. Disappointment, mortifi- 
cation, misconception, enmity, pain, death, 
these may come to you, but if they come to 
you in doing your duty it is all right. "It 
cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jeru- 
salem," said Jesus. "It is dreadful to suffer 
except in doing duty. To suffer there is glori- 
ous.' ' That is our translation of his words 
into our own life. 

IV. 331. 



One endless living story! 

One poem spread abroad! 
And the sum of all our glory 

Is the countenance of God. 

George Macdonald. 



MARCH 2. 61 



The ti??ie is short. — i Cor. vii. 29. 

THE shortness of life is closely associated, 
not merely with the great hopes of the 
future, but with the real vitality of the pres- 
ent. What then ? If you and I complain how 
short life is, how quickly it flies through the 
grasp with which we try to hold it, we are 
complaining of that which is the necessary 
consequence of our vitality. You can make 
life long only by making it slow; and if you 
want to make it slow, I should think there 
were men enough in town who could tell 
you how, — men with idle hands and brains, 
who seem to have so much trouble to get 
through life as it is that we cannot imagine 
that they really wish that there were more of 
it. . . . The shortness of life is bound up 
with its fulness. It is to him who is most ac- 
tive, always thinking, feeling, working, caring 
for people and for things, that life seems 
short. Strip a life empty and it will seem 
long enough. 

I. 318, 319. 

He liveth long who liveth well, — 
All other life is short and vain; 

He liveth longest who can tell 
Of living most for heavenly gain. 

Waste not thy being; back to Him 
Who freely gave it, freely give; 

Else is that being but a dream — 
'Tis but to be, and not to live. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



62 MARCH 3. 



THE more we watch the lives of men, the 
more we see that one of the reasons why 
men are not occupied with great thoughts and 
interests is the way in which their lives are 
overfilled with little things. It is not that 
you deliberately dislike thought and study 
and benevolence. It is mainly that you are 
so busy with amusement and society and idle- 
ness that you are living such an unprofitable 
life. It is not that you despise the highest 
hopes and interests of your immortal nature 
that you neglect them so. It is that your 
passions crowd so thick about you that you 
are entirely occupied with them. . . . You 
have got to say to these crowding passions of 
yours: " Stand aside. Leave my soul open, 
that it and God, it and duty, may come to- 
gether; " — making an emptiness about the soul 
that the higher fulness may fill it. It may be 
temporary. Once more the lower needs may 
fasten on us, the lower pleasures try to satisfy 
us; but they never can be quite so arbitrary 
and arrogant as they were, after they have 
once had to yield to their superiors. . . . 
Perhaps some day they may themselves be- 
come, and dignify themselves by becoming, 
the meek interpreters and ministers of those 
very powers which they once shut out from 
the soul. II. 206, 209, 212. 

For when thou seekest not altogether visible things to 

enjoy them, 
But beholdest them to bless the name of thy Creator — 
Fashioning to thyself out of the highest and lowest of His 

works a sort of ladder, 
On which thou mayest lean to get upwards — 
Thou shalt be delivered from the baneful snares of this 

world. Thomas A Kempis. 



MARCH 4. 63 

THE purpose of God's government, the one 
design on which it all proceeds, is that 
the whole world, through obedience to Him, 
should be wrought into His likeness, and made 
the utterance of His character. . . . With 
wills harmonized with His will; with souls that 
love and hate in truest unison of sympathy with 
His; with no purposes left in us but His pur- 
poses, — then we have come to what He wants 
the world to come to. We have taken our 
places in the slowly rising temple of His will. 
To whatever worlds He carries our souls when 
they shall pass out of these imprisoning 
bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours 
shall find themselves part of the same great 
temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone. 
There can be no end of the universe where 
God is to which that growing temple does 
not reach, the temple of a creation to be 
wrought at last into a perfect utterance of 
God by a perfect obedience to God. 11. 69, 71. 

Thy wonderful grand will, my God; 

Triumphantly I make it mine; 
And faith shall breathe her glad " Amen " 

To every dear command of Thine. 

Beneath the splendor of Thy choice, 
Thy perfect choice for me, I rest; 

Outside it now I dare not live, 
Within it I must needs be blest. 

Then may Thy perfect, glorious Will 

Be evermore fulfilled in me, 
And make my life an answering chord 

Of glad, responsive harmony. 

Jean Sophia Pigott. 



64 MARCH s. 

HE who has lived in the form of an experi- 
ence looks back, while he who has en- 
tered into the substance and soul of an expe- 
rience looks forward. " The outward man 
perishes," as Paul says, " but the inward man 
is renewed day by day." The perishing of a 
form and method in which we have lived may 
naturally bring a pensive sadness like that 
which always comes to us as we watch a set- 
ting of the sun, but he who is in the true spirit 
of the sunset turns instantly from the west- 
ward to the eastern look. The things the 
day has given him, — its knowledge, and its 
inspirations, and its friendship, and its faith, 
— these the departing sun is powerless to carry 
with it. They claim the new day in which to 
show their power and to do their work. Live 
deeply and you must live hopefully. That is 
the law of life. 

VI. 329. 



Though this very day 
Casts but a dull stone on Time's heaped-up 

cairn, 
A morning light will break once more and 

draw 
The hidden glories of a thousand hues 
Out from its crystal depths and ruby-spots 
And sapphire-veins, unseen, unknown before. 

Time 
Is God's, and all his miracles are His; 
And in the Future he overtakes the Past, 
Which was a prophecy of times to come. 

George Macdonald. 



MARCH 6. 65 



Men see not the bright light which is in the 
clouds. — Job xxxvii. 21. 

THE sense of human pain grows stronger all 
the time. And it sometimes seems as 
if the sense of purpose and education grew 
weaker in a multitude of souls. It is the 
heart of man taken, Balaam-like, to a place 
whence it can see the part and not the whole; 
and who that listens does not hear the mut- 
tering of the curse ? Where is the help, first 
for your soul, then for the whole great world ? 
Not in saying that pain is not pain, not in 
shutting the eyes to the part which is so aw- 
fully manifest, but in seeing, in insisting upon 
seeing, the whole. 

11 To feel, although no tongue can prove, 
That every cloud that spreads above, 
And veileth love, itself is love." 

That is the only help. He who lets his 
heart bear witness, he who lets the experience 
of countless sufferers bear witness, he who 
lets Christ bear witness, that no suffering ever 
yet came to any human creature by which it 
was not possible that that human creature 
should be made better and purer and great- 
er, — he has caught sight of the whole; and 
though he walks in silence and perplexity and 
suspense, he does not curse. 

VI. 222. 

Knowing that here we live but in a tent, 
And that our house is yonder, without fail. 
George Macdoxald. 



66 MARCH 7. 



Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the 
wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 

Matt. iv. 1. 

THE temptation of Jesus is certainly a very- 
wonderful event. There is no incident 
in all His history on which the imagination 
may expend itself with a more lavish spec- 
ulation; and, on the other hand, there is 
none that comes nearer to practical life with 
stimulus and comfort. . . . The man who has 
seen Christ tempted will not deny temptation 
thenceforth. He will not be found explaining 
it away. He will not delude himself with 
vain hopes of escaping it and living a smooth, 
untempted life. He will read in the tempta- 
tion of the perfect Life that that is impossible 
forever for any man. When he is depressed 
and hungry and exhausted, he will look for the 
devil as his Lord did, and when he sees him 
coming, when he hears his words and feels 
the desire of sin stirring in his heart, he will not 
say, " Oh, this is nothing but one stage of my 
growth." He will recognize the old enemy 
of his Master coming for the old battle, and 
gather up his strength and pray for his Mas- 
ter's strength in the hour of terrible, inevita- 
ble struggle. VII. 130, 133. 

Distrust thyself, but trust His grace, 

It is enough for thee : 
In every trial thou shalt trace 

Its all-sufficiency. 

Distrust thyself, but trust His strength : 

In Him thou shalt be strong : 
His weakest ones may learn at length 

A daily triumph-song. 

Frances R. Havergal. 



MARCH 8. 67 



SURELY it always must be full of meaning, 
that Christ Himself, before He began His 
struggles with the Pharisees and Scribes, went 
out into the desert and struggled with Him- 
self. . . . Many a time the wilfulness, and 
narrowness, and selfishness which He saw in 
the faces which surrounded Him in some 
crowd in the temple must have been clearer to 
Him and easier to understand, because they 
were just the passions which had tried to take 
possession of His own heart, and failed, dur- 
ing those long terrible days in the dark wilder- 
ness. And oh! my friends, there is no way in 
which whatever personal struggles with faith- 
lessness and sin we may have gone through 
can be made to keep their freshness and power, 
and at the same time be kept from becoming 
a source of morbid wretchedness, no way that 
is half so efficient as that they should con- 
stantly be called on to light up for us the 
same sort of struggles in other men, and give 
us the power to help them with intelligence 
and sympathy. Demand that lofty service 
of every deep experience through which you 
pass. Demand that it shall help you under- 
stand and aid the battles of your brethren. 

VI. 84, 85. 

So thou wilt be sterner foe, 
So thou wilt be dearer friend; 

So the saints thy name shall know, 
And Christ own thee at the end. 

Cantica Spiritualis. 



68 MARCH 



Com?nand that these sto7tes be made bread. 

Matt. iv. 3. 

IF we had stood there and heard the Satanic 
demand made we should have waited, stop- 
ping our breath to hear some supreme asser- 
tion of the Godhead that repelled so low an 
insult. "Go to men," we should have lis- 
tened for the Lord to say — "go to men with 
arguments like those. Their natures are built 
to answer such appeals. All that a man hath 
will he give for that life which bread must 
feed." . . . 

I love Christ all the more when I see how 
different His answer was from that. I love 
Him when I see Him declare Himself a man, 
and from the human standpoint fling aside 
the tempter's plea. I reverence and cling to 
the true human nature that there was in Him 
when I hear Him go back and take up the 
words that had been on human lips, that de- 
clared the resources of human nature, that 
asserted the higher life in Man: "It is writ- 
ten, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
of God." The danger is to us who hold so 
much to the divinity of Christ that His human- 
ity will mean too little. Let us remember 
that in times such as this of the temptation 
there is a strength for us in the thought that 
it was a Man who fought and conquered, 
which no simple assurance of His being God 
could give. VII. 151, 152. 

For in that He himself hath suffered, being 
tempted, He is able to succor them that are tempted. 

Heb. ii. 18. 



MARCH 10. 69 



YOU cannot be man and live a man's life 
without coming into this world where 
sin is and where you must be tried. That 
great temptation that comes swaggering up 
and frightening you so has got the best part 
of your character held under his brawny arm. 
You cannot get it without wrestling with him 
and forcing it away from him. That moun- 
tain that towers up and defies you has got 
your spiritual health away up on its snowy 
summit. That is what shines there in the sun. 
You cannot reach it except by the terrible 
climb. Ask yourself what you would have 
been if you had never been tempted, and own 
what a blessed thing the educating power of 
temptation is. And then ... as Christ's 
temptation was vicarious, and when He con- 
quered He conquered for others besides Him- 
self, so it was with us. There are men and 
women all around us who have got to meet 
the same temptations that we are meeting. 
Will it help them or not to know that we have 
met them and conquered them ? Will it help 
us or not to know that if we conquer the 
temptation we conquer not for ourselves only, 
but for them ? The vicariousness of all life! 
There is not one of us who has not some one 
more or less remotely fastened to his acts, 
concerning whom he may say, as Christ said, 
" For their sakes I sanctify myself." 

VII. 140, 141. 

Nor knowest thou what argument 
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. 

Emerson. 



7o MARCH ii. 



Count it all joy that ye fall into divers tempta- 
tions. — James i. 2. 

HOW strange it seems to us that there 
should be such a thing as temptation in 
the world at all! God sends us into the world 
and hangs in the great distance before us cer- 
tain lofty prizes — goodness, truth, purity — 
which He has made our hearts capable of de- 
siring. . . . But we have not really started 
towards them before the presence of another 
power begins to show itself. Hands pluck at 
us to draw us out of the straight way. Voices 
call to us with enticements or with threats to 
make us turn aside. . . . No adoption of 
any strict rule of life, no separation of our- 
selves from a certain region of dangerous 
occupations, sets us free from the persecution 
of temptation. We are tempted to sin every- 
where. It is pathetic, almost terrible, to think 
how long this has been going on. Through 
all those weary years which it tires us to think 
of, they have been so many; through all those 
monotonous generations that we hear flowing 
on endlessly through the cavernous depths of 
history, as one listens to a stream dropping 
down monotonously forever underground; 
through all the years and generations of 
human life men have been tempted — not one 
that ever lived that did not meet this persist- 
ent, intrusive enticement to sin. vil. 130. 

Now, the training, strange and lowly, 

Unexplained and trying now : 
Afterward, the service holy, 

And the Master's " Enter thou ! " 

Frances R. Havergal. 



MARCH 12. 71 



Will He plead against me with His great power? 
No j but He would put strength into me. 

Job xxiii. 6. 

FOR years you have lived, it may be, a se- 
cluded and protected life. " Lead me 
not into temptation," so you have prayed 
every morning, and every day has brought 
the answer to your prayer. But some day all 
that breaks and goes to pieces. A great 
temptation comes and is not hindered. Then 
you cry out for the old mercy and it is not 
given. . . . And then, behold what comes! A 
new mercy ! You go into the temptation. Your 
old security perishes, but by and by out of its 
death comes a new strength. Not to be saved 
from dying but to die and then to live again 
in a new security, a strong and trusty charac- 
ter, educated by trial, purified by fire, — that 
is what comes as the issue of the whole. Not 
a victory for you, preserving you from danger, 
but a victory in you, strengthening you by 
danger, — that is the experience from which 
you go forth, strong with a strength which 
nothing can subdue. 

V. 35- 



' Oh, may we follow undismayed 
Where'er our God shall call! 
And may His spirit's present aid 

Uphold us lest we fall! 
Till in the end of days we stand 
As victors in a deathless land. 

John Henry Newman. 



72 MARCH 13. 



The mind shall banquet, though the body pine. 

Shakespeare. 

HEALTH, companionship, life itself, these 
are no longer indispensable when Christ 
has shown us God. A resignation that is not 
despair, but aspiration; a looser grasp on 
time, that means how strongly we are holding 
to eternity; this must come to us when, after 
all our doing of little temporary things, we 
have at last begun in Christ the life and work 
that is to go on forever and forever. Then 
even the most essential things of this world 
we can do without, if need be. We have 
passed from the lower to the higher necessi- 
ties. We walk by faith, and not by sight. 
Already, even while we are yet in the flesh, 
before we cross the river, the promise finds 
its fulfilment. We live in the world, but we 
do not live by the world. Already the sun is 
no more our light by day; neither for bright- 
ness does the moon give light unto us; but the 
Lord is unto us an everlasting light, and our 
God our glory. I. 298. 

Light of the world! for ever, ever shining; 

There is no change in Thee; 
True Light of life, all joy and health enshrin- 
ing, 

Thou canst not fade nor flee. 

Thou hast arisen, but Thou descendest never; 

To-day shines as the past; 
All that Thou wast Thou art, and shalt be 
ever, — 

Brightness from first to last! 

HORATIUS BONAR, 



MARCH 14. 73 

Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O wo- 
man y great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou 
wilt. — Matt. xv. 25. 

FAITH is the necessary power that the 
weaker has over the stronger, the lower 
over the higher. . . . This power comes to 
perfection in Jesus. Could there be a more 
complete picture of it than shines out in His 
own story of the shepherd and the sheep ? 
The shepherd has folded his ninety-and-nine; 
everything is safe and strong and prosperous; 
he stands with his hand upon the sheepfold 
gate; and then, just as he seems all wrapped 
up in the satisfaction and completeness of the 
sight, there comes, so light that no ear except 
his can hear it, the cry of one poor lost sheep 
off in the mountains, and it summons him with 
an irresistible challenge, and his staff is in his 
hand instantly, and he turns his back on 
everything else to be the slave of that one 
lost sheep till it is found. What a wonderful 
and everlasting and universal story that par- 
able is! III. 174, 175. 

He bendeth low from His holy hill 
Searching the shadows gray and chill, — 
And clear through the angel-singing — 

What time the sons of God 
Shout loud, for joy upspringing, 

Till all the heavens are bowed — 
He hears the faintest sighing 

Of some poor, far-off soul, 
Who turns to look to the holy place 

While the billows round him roll. 

B. M. 



74 MARCH 15. 



/ seek not mine own will, but the will of the 
Father who hath sent me, — John v. 30. 

TT was in His sonship to God that the secret 
* of the holiness of Jesus lay. His Father's 
business was the sum of all His life. . . . 
The model and the impulse of all duty He car- 
ried in His own filial heart, which was forever 
bearing witness to Him of His Father's per- 
fectness. His incarnate days, with all their 
common duties held and illuminated in that 
high consciousness of sonship, must have been 
one with the eternity of the past and the eter- 
nity that was to be. Duty must have been its 
own revealer and its own reward. Liberty 
must have been sublimely consistent with the 
most scrupulous obedience. The doing right 
and the being right must have been like the 
sunshine and the sun. And what duty was to 
our Master it shall be to us just as soon as we 
are filled with His idea, — just as soon as His 
spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are 

the sons of God. 

VIII. 70. 

For what is freedom but the unfettered use 
Of all the powers that God for use had given ? 
But chiefly this, Him first, Him last to view 
Through meaner powers and secondary things 
Effulgent, as through clouds that veil His 
blaze. S. T. Coleridge. 



MARCH 16. 75 



No man cometh icnto the Father but by Me. 

John xv. 6. 

BY the power of Christ we may all come 
near to God too, and have from out the 
open door of His sanctuary, to which we have 
fled, His view of mortal life and all its inter- 
ests. For us, too, this world's existence may 
subside into its clearly marked circles, and we 
may see as God sees where each circle ends; 
see how the selfishnesses soon die out; see 
how the affections sweep out into wider lines; 
see how nothing but the highest loves reach 
out into infinity and send life forward into 
eternity. These times, when we are nearest 
to. God, are the times when this world's things 
show their true values to us. Do you not 
know that ? Do you remember how it all 
looked to you when you came home from the 
funeral, not morbid with hopeless sorrow, but 
seeming to be above the w T orld, and to be 
standing with the friend who had gone, in the 
presence of the throne of God ? Do you 
remember how things changed their relative 
importance to you then, how the last were 
first and the first were last, as they shall be 
on the judgment day ? . . . You were above 
complaints and small trials. You had entered 
into the sanctuary of God, and you saw the 
end of these things. 

VI. 121. 

The Almighty's shadow is a starlit night; 
His cloud is ever full of hidden light. 

Samuel Longfellow. 



j6 MARCH 17. 

'"THE great truth of Christianity, the great 
* truth of Christ, is that sin is unnatu- 
ral. . . . And that which is unnatural is not 
by any necessity permanent. The struggle of 
all nature is against the unnatural — to dislodge 
it and cast it out. That beautiful struggle 
pervades the world. It is going on in every 
clod of earth, in every tree, in every star, and 
in the soul of man. First to declare and then 
to strengthen that struggle in the soul of man 
was the work of Christ. That work still lin- 
gers and fails of full completion, but its power 
is present in the world. When He takes pos- 
session of a nature He quickens that struggle 
into life. No longer can that nature think 
itself doomed to evil. . . . The wonder is 
not that it should some day be cast out; the 
wonder is that it should ever have come in. 
The victory promised in a sinless Son of man 
is already potentially attained in the intense 

conception of its naturalness. 

VI. 65. 

Courage! — we travel through a darksome cave; 
But still, as nearer to the light we draw, 
Fresh gales will reach us from the upper air, 
And wholesome dews of heaven our forehead 

lave, 
The darkness lighten more, till full of awe, 
We stand in the open sunshine — unaware. 

R. G. Trench. 



MARCH 18. 77 



YOU never did a sin that did not give its 
warning to you before you did it. . . . 
Perhaps you did not hear, but it was not that 
the warning bell did not ring. Perhaps you 
called that first sign of weakness a mere acci- 
dent, and tried to believe that it meant noth- 
ing, but if you gave your thought to it you 
knew ... it was the house's feeble timbers 
creaking before their fall. There are such 
warnings of coming sins that every one of us 
has received — sins yet undone; sins which, it 
may be, are to make our whole life dark some 
day, whose threatening we can read, if we are 
wise enough, in something that has come to us 
already. . . . 

Life is full of such warnings. No man 
grows to be more than a mere boy without 
learning on what side of his moral nature he 
will fall if he falls at all. Every one of us 
knows, who is in the least thoughtful, what 
sort of villain he would be if he grew villain- 
ous. Thank God, these warnings may save 
us from the things they warn us of. These 
blessed bells that ring out in the darkness may 
turn us resolutely off from the cruel surf that 
roars behind them. 



VII. 121, 122. 



Man is no star, but a quick coal 

Of mortal fire: 
Who blows it not, nor doth control 

A faint desire, 
Lets his own ashes choke his soul. 

George Herbert. 



78 MARCH 19. 



The mystery of iniquity, — 2 Thess. ii. 7. 

'T'HERE is something oppressive, something 
* terrible, in this great mysterious pres- 
ence of sin right in our midst, so that nothing 
goes on save in its shadow, — no state is 
formed, no family grows up, no social com- 
pact is organized, no character matures with- 
out its blighting mixture. Right in our midst, 
and yet no voice of man or God is opened to 
tell us how it came here. . . . [Yet] there was 
a time when it was not, there was a moment 
when it began to be. . . . There is no other 
way of explaining the strange fact that amid 
all the personal badness, and social corruption 
that is in the world, the human mind has been 
able to preserve the ideal of a pure society and 
a perfect life, to dream of it, sometimes to 
strive after it, except by acknowledging the 
reality of an entrance of iniquity into the 
world, and looking back to a time before that 
invasion when the world was sinless. 

VI. 9, 4- 

My own hope is, a sun will pierce 

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; 

That after Last returns the First, 

Though a wide compass round be fetched; 

That what began best can't end worst, 
Nor what God blest once, prove accurst. 

Browning. 



MARCH 20. 79 



That whosoever believeth in Him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life. — John iii. 16. 

WE have spoken of the mysteriousness of 
sin in its origin and operations. It 
would be cruel, false, and unchristian if I 
closed without telling you of the diviner mys- 
tery in which human iniquity finds its cure. 
The first thought round which the grand won- 
der of the atonement grows into shape is this 
thought of sin as a real live thing standing 
forth to be fought with, to be conquered, to 
be killed. . . . To meet that enmity, to slay 
that giant, Christ comes forth with his won- 
derful nature. He undertakes a distinct and 
dreadful struggle. We see its outward mani- 
festation in the agony of the cross. All the 
deeper battle goes on out of our sight. We 
know not how it fares till the word of God 
comes to tell us that the victory is won by our 
Redeemer, and that Satan is trodden into death 
by the dying Christ. Of all the Mystery of 
Iniquity, where is the Mystery like this ? You 
see how true a mystery it is. Nothing but the 
fact we know. . . . That shining, splendid 
fact, that gracious, glorious fact — the fact of 
the Lord's victory and of Satan's fall — stands 
forth so clear that none can doubt it. It takes 
its place as the one certain, central fact of 
hope. By it the living live, by it the dying 
die; in it the glorified rejoice forever. 

VI. 14, 15. 



8o MARCH 21. 



Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, 
Why could not we cast him out ? 

Matt. xvii. 9. 

HE tells them that the reason of their failure 
is that they have been trying to do by 
themselves what they can only do when He is 
behind them, when their natures are so open 
that His strength can freely flow out through 
them. . . . Look at the artist's chisel. 
" Why cannot I carve ? " it cries. And then 
the artist comes and seizes it. The chisel lays 
itself into his hand, and is obedient to him. 
That obedience is faith. It opens the chan- 
nels between the sculptor's brain and the hard 
steel. Thought, feeling, imagination, skill 
flow down from the deep chambers of the 
artist's soul to the chisel's edge. The sculp- 
tor and the chisel are not two, but one. It is 
the unit which they make that carves the 
statue. 

This is our principle, then. The unit of 
power for moral victory — in other words, for 
goodness — on the earth is not man and is not 
God. It is God and man, not two, but one, 
not meeting accidentally, not running together 
in emergencies only to separate again when 
the emergency is over; it is God and man 
belonging essentially together, God filling 
man, man opening his life by faith to be a part 
of God's, as the gulf opens itself and is part 
of the great ocean. 

III. 181, 185. 



MARCH 22. 81 



When I am weak> then I am strong. 

2 Cor. xii. 10. 

TF the condition for which man was made was 
* a related, a bound up, a dependent condi- 
tion, then the highest human happiness must 
always come with the most complete conform- 
ity to that first idea of human life. If depend- 
ence, then, be happiness, . . . independence 
of God, self-sufficiency, must be unhappiness. 
And since suffering, in all its various depart- 
ments, is the breaking up of self-sufficiency, of 
self-confidence, is it not evident that, rightly 
used, it may be the setting free of the human 
soul from an unnatural and forced condition, 
into its natural, intended, and so happiest 
life ? . . . Anything in body, brain, or heart 
that gets that idea of insufficiency home to us, 
may set us to digging beneath the self-surface 
of our vale of misery to find the God below 
for w 7 hich the thirsty soul was made. . . . 
Prosperity is unconscious of God. Suffering, 
whether we will or no, has to be conscious of 
him. 

VI. 29, 30. 

Submit thy sorrow and thy soul to God, 
And learn what peace it is to kiss His rod, 
Who answers wishes ere they turn to prayers, 
And with His blessings takes us unawares. 
Abraham Percy Miller. 



82 MARCH 23. 



No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by 
the Holy Ghost. — 1 Cor. xii. 3. 

NO soul is too low to be brought by the Holy 
Spirit to the place where, answering 
back by the divine within it to the divine 
above it, it may say that " Jesus is the Lord." 
No soul is too high to find in that announce- 
ment of its faith the consummation of its life. 
Here, then, is where the highest and the low- 
est meet. Here is where they have met 
through all the ages. Glorious thinkers, great 
strong workers, sufferers whose lives were 
miracles of patience, all of these singing as 
they went their ways, " Jesus is Lord, Jesus is 
Lord." And all around them, and in among 
them, dull, plodding souls, and minds whose 
thought was all confused and bewildered with 
emotion, and little children, with their crude 
clear pictures in their simple brains, all these 
too singing, in their several tones and with 
their several clearness, " Jesus is Lord, Jesus 
is Lord." . . . 

And oh, my friends, remember that the own- 
ing of Christ's mastery here is bat the begin- 
ning of the participation in Christ's glory in 
heaven. VI. 106, 107. 

Oh, let Christ and sunshine in, 
Let His Love its sweet way win! 
Nothing human is too mean 
To receive the King unseen; 
Not a pleasure or a care 
But celestial robes may wear: 
Impulse, thought, and action may 
Live immortally to-day. Lucy Larcom. 



March 24. s$ 

If ye have faith, and doubt not. 

Matt. xxi. 21. 

f^ ET rid of the awful assumption that it 
^-* [sin] is bound up in your constitution; 
cease to be a weak fatalist about it. . . . There 
are few things more constantly marvellous 
about our human nature than its power of ac- 
climating itself in moral and spiritual regions 
where it once seemed impossible that it should 
live at all. The tree upon the hillside says: 
" Here and here alone can I live. Here my 
fathers lived in all their generations. . . . 
Take me down to the plain and I shall die." 
The gardener knows better. He takes the 
doubting and despairing plant and carries it, 
even against its will, to the broad valley, and 
sets it where the cold winds shall not smite it, 
and where the rich ground feeds it with luxu- 
riance. And almost as they touch each other 
the ground and the root claim one another, 
and rich revelations of its own possibility 
flood the poor plant and fill it full of marvel 

with itself. 

VI. 68. 

For all grows sweet in Thee 
Since Thou didst gather us in One, and bring 
This fading flower of our humanity 
To perfect blossoming. 

Dora Green well. 



84 MARCH 25. 

Blessed are the pure in heart \ for they shall see 
God. — Matt. v. 8. 

THROUGH the mists of long and devout 
tradition which have obscured her char- 
acter and made her very person almost myth- 
ical, we are surprised sometimes in reading the 
Gospels at the clearness and simplicity with 
which Mary the mother of our Lord stands 
out before us there. She speaks only on three 
occasions, but . . . those three utterances of 
hers are like three clear notes of a bell, that 
show how sound and rich its metal is. Think 
what they were. In the presence of the mes- 
senger who comes to tell her of her great 
privilege she bows her head and says, " Behold 
the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me 
according to thy word." When she finds her 
Son in the temple she cries out to Him, " Son, 
why hast Thou thus dealt with us ? Thy father 
and I have sought Thee sorrowing/' When 
she stands with Him before the puzzled guests 
at Cana she turns to the servants and says, 
"Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." 
The young soul's consecration ! The mother's 
overrunning love! The disciple's perfect loy- 
alty! What can be clearer than the simple, 
true, brave, loving woman that those words 
reveal? 

V. 340. 

Still to the lowly soul 

He doth himself impart, 
And for His cradle and His throne 

Chooseth the pure in heart. 

Keble. 



MARCH 26. 85 



In Thy light shall we see light. 

Ps. xxxvi. 9. 

STAND where you cannot see man's great- 
ness, and the Incarnation seems a wild, 
inexplicable dream. Stand where no music 
reaches you from the deep harmonies of man's 
present spiritual life, and it is out of your 
power to believe in heaven. Lose sight of 
sin, and the darker possibilities of eternity are 
hideous impossibilities. The religious truth 
which you see by itself, out of its position in 
the great whole which ought to hold it, fails 
to bear witness of its truth. Strive then for 
wholes, and let the parts reveal themselves 
within them. Strive for God, who is the 
whole. ... By obedience, by communion, 
climb to the height where you shall be with 
God, and then the truths about God shall open 
their reasonableness, their richness, and their 
harmony. 

VI. 220. 



For no man by himself is able to investi- 
gate this mystery; 
Nor is it grasped by human wisdom; 
But rather by the strength of faith, 
And the intuition of a pure mind, 
Enlightened from above. 

Thomas a Kempis. 



86 MARCH 27. 



THE age of real faith does not covet again 
1 the chains of superstition. The world at 
peace does not ask to be shaken once more by 
the earthquakes of war. But faith does feel the 
beauty of complete surrender which supersti- 
tion kept for its sole spiritual virtue; and 
peace, with its diffused responsibility, is 
kindled at thought of heroic and unquestion- 
ing obedience which the education of war pro- 
duced. Still let superstition and war lie dead. 
We will not call them back to life; but we will 
borrow their jewels of silver and jewels of gold 
as we go forth into the wilderness to worship 
our God with larger worship. Do you not feel 
this is in all the best progress ? Do you not see 
it in the eyes of mankind, in the depths of the 
eyes of mankind always, as it turns away from 
the dead forms of its old masters and goes 
forth into the years to be; the hoarded power 
of the past glowing beneath the satisfaction 
of the present and the fiery hope of the un- 
known future ? VI. 62. 

Out of the years bloom the eternities! 

And nothing dies that ever was alive; 

All that endears 
And sanctifies the human must survive; 
Of God they are, and in His smile they thrive — 

The immortal years! 

Lucy Larcom. 



MARCH 28. 87 






They say unto Him, We have here but five 
loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them 
hither to me. — Matt. xiv. 17, 18. 

SURELY, the act is a very striking one. . . . 
Our first notions of a Deity are of One 
who is above all law and order and economy. 
Let the poor be niggardly, a slave to rules, 
counting over his little stock, squeezing every 
penny that he pays; but let the All-Powerful 
be open-handed, counting as nothing what 
other beings must save, originating life when- 
ever life is needed, full of an easy spontaneity, 
flinging the miracles of creation everywhere. 
But it is striking to see how,, as men go on and 
learn more of God, these ideas which were at 
first cast almost indignantly out of their con- 
ception of Him, gradually come back and are 
set in the place of highest honor. It is God's 
highest glory that He is a God of Law. Con- 
tinuousness is the crown of His government. 
That He brings every future out of some past 
is the charm of all His government. That 
He lets nothing go to waste is the highest per- 
fection of His boundless resource. Continuity 
and economy are His solemn foot-prints by 
which we trace His presence in our world. 
The need of evolution, the necessity that 
everything which is to be should come out of 
something which has been before, and the 
abhorrence of waste, — continuity and econ- 
omy, — these are the proof-marks of Divinity. 

II. 129, 130. 

Earth holds heaven in the bud : our perfection there has 
to be developed out cf our imperfection here. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



MARCH 29. 



THERE is the surface sight of life, which is 
bright and enthusiastic. There is the 
sight of life which is deeper than this, which 
is sad and puzzled. There is the deepest 
sight of all, which is bright again with a truer 
light, and enthusiastic again with a soberer 
but a more genuine happiness. . . . There 
come forth adaptations for the higher work in 
things which have seemed wholly unfitted to 
produce the lower. Things which never could 
have made a man happy, develop a power to 
make him strong. Strength and not happi- 
ness, or rather only that happiness which 
comes by strength, is recognized as the end of 
human living. II. 151, 153. 

" Give me the wine of happiness," I cried, 
" The bread of life! — Oh ye benign, unknown, 
Immortal powers ! — I crave them for mine own ; 
I am athirst, I will not be denied 
Though hell were up in arms! " — No sound 

replied; 
But turning back to my rude board and lone, 
My soul, confounded, there beheld — a stone, 
Pale water in a shallow cup beside! 
With gushing tears, in utter hopelessness, 
I stood and gazed. Then rose a voice that 

spoke: 
" God gave thee this, and what He gives will 

bless." 
And 'neath the hands that trembling took and 

broke, 
Lo, truly, a sweet miracle divine — 
The stone turned bread, the water ruby wine! 

Stuart Sterne. 



MARCH 30. 89 



If He should make my web a blight 
Of life's fair picture of delight, 
My heart's content would find it right. 

Emerson. 

AMONG the tests of men there stands very 
high this power to do without. . . . 
But then this power of doing without some 
things is, at its bottom, a power of not doing 
without some other things. We are rescued 
from the abject slavery of the lower by enter- 
ing into the absolute servantship of the higher. 
He to whom honor is necessary can do with- 
out money. He who must have goodness can 
get along without praise. He who must have 
God's communion can do without the sweet 
companionships of fellow-men. He who can- 
not lose his eternity can easily cast aside time 
and the body which belongs to it, and by the 
martyr's slow or sudden death exchange 
the visible for the invisible, the symbol for 
the reality. Nay, he who values most intensely 
his friend's or his child's eternal life can, not 
easily but still not grudgingly, let go the joy 
and daily comfort of his friend's or his child's 
hourly presence, and see him die that he may 
enter into life. On these two ladders, as it 
were, by these two scales, the order of human 
character mounts up, — the power to do with- 
out and the power not to do without. 

I. 292. 

Not for ourselves alone we strive, 
Since thy perfection manifest 
Bids self resign what self desired, 
Postponing good for best. 

Bliss Carman. 



9 o MARCH 31. 



We wrestle . . . against powers. 

Ephes. vi. 12. 

ST. PAUL believed in spirits good and bad. 
The beauty of his belief in them was 
that, different as they might be from us in the 
conditions of their life, they still belonged to 
the same great moral system to which he be- 
longed. The good spirits were not to be pro- 
pitiated, and the evil spirits were not to be 
disarmed by magic and incantations. He who 
did righteousness called to himself the most 
mysterious strength of the unseen worlds. . . . 
For him all good beings fought; against his 
simple righteousness all evil beings would beat 
themselves in vain, and ultimately must go 
down and fail, here or beyond the stars. That 
is a noble faith. In the simplicity and gran- " 
deur of a faith like that, man will some day 
come once more to the now almost lost belief 
in the connection of his life with unseen spirit- 
ual powers. 

VI. 75. 



While we discern it not, and least believe. 
On stairs invisible betwixt His heaven 
And our unholy, sinful, toilsome earth 
Celestial messengers of loftiest good 
Upward and downward pass continually. 
Arthur Hugh Clough, 



APRIL i. 91 

MEN talk — very religious men — as if God 
were a sort of reserve force, to be called 
in when He was needed, a sort of last resort 
when man's strength failed. . . . The thought 
of God which Christ came to reveal, the 
thought of God of which all Christ's own life 
was full, is something totally different from 
that. To Christ's thought God and man are 
part of one system — one structure, one work- 
ing-force. To separate them is not simply to 
deny man a power that he needs : it is to break 
a unity, and to set a part of the power to the 
attempt to do what the whole power ought to 
do as one. ... It is engine and steam that 
are to make the running power. It is artist 
and chisel that are to carve the statue. It is 
God and you that live your life. For you to 
try to live it alone is to try to do all the work 
with one part of the power. God is not a 
crutch coming in to help your lameness, un- 
necessary to you if you had all your strength. 
He is the breath in your lungs. The stronger 
you are, the more thoroughly you are your- 
self, the more you need of it, the more you 
need of Him. 

VI. 102, 103. 



He breathed forth His spirit 
Into the slumbering dust, and upright stand- 
ing, it laid its 
Hand on its heart, and felt it was warm with 

a flame out of heaven. 
Quench, oh, quench not that flame! It is the 
breath of your being. 

Longfellow. 



92 APRIL 2. 

T N a picture by Domenichino at Bologna, an 
•*■ angel stands at the foot of the empty cross, 
and tries with his finger one of the sharp points 
in the crown of thorns which the Saviour had 
worn during His passion. It is all a sad in- 
explicable wonder to him. It appeals to no 
experience of wickedness and woe in his pure 
and angelic nature. But when you or I take 
the crown of thorns into our hands we know in 
our own hearts the meanness, the jealousy, the 
hatred which it represents. . . . With simple 
wonder an angel might walk through our 
State Prison halls; but a man must walk there 
full of humbleness and charity; for, as the 
best man that ever lived finds something of 
common humanity in us which makes his good- 
ness seem not impossible to us, so the worst of 
men stirs by the sight of his human sin some 
sense of what human power of sinfulness we 

too possess. 

I. 251. 

How much, preventing God, how much I owe 
To the defences Thou hast round me set, — 

Example, custom, fear, occasion slow, — 
These scorned bondsmen were my parapet. 
I dare not peep over this parapet 

To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below, 
The depths of sin to which I had descended, 
Had not these me against myself defended. 

Emerson. 



APRIL 3. 93 

MEN ciy to-day, " Christianity is the re- 
ligion of the rich and comfortable, "and 
while they speak their cry is drowned in the 
rush of the poor, the hungry, and the wretched 
to some common men's revival. They cry 
again, " The Christian belief belongs to the 
ignorant," and lo, the wisest thought of the 
world comes back again, as it is ever coming, 
to the mystery of Christ and of His treatment 
of the soul of man. It is not that they have 
mistaken the class to which they should assign 
the Christian faith. Their mistake is in giving 
it to any class. It belongs to the individual. 
It always has its eyes fastened on him. One 
of the noblest functions of Christianity in the 
world is to lie behind the class crystallizations 
of mankind, like a solvent into which they 
shall return and blend with one another, — to 
crystallize, no doubt, again, but always to be 
reminded that the classes into which they crys- 
tallize are lesser facts than the manhood into 
which they are repeatedly dissolved. 

VIII. 114. 

For the love of God is broader 

Than the measures of man's mind; 

And the heart of the Eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind. 

But we make His love too narrow 

By false limits of our own; 
And we magnify His strictness 

With a zeal He will not own. 

There is plentiful redemption 

In the blood that has been shed; 

There is joy for all the members 

In the sorrows of the Head. Faber. 



94 APRIL 4. 



Through Jesus Christ. — Rom. vi. 23. 

IN Jesus of Nazareth appeared the Mediator 
by whom was to be the Atonement. His 
was the life and nature which, standing be- 
tween the Godhood and the manhood, was to 
bridge the gulf and make the firm, bright road 
over which blessing and prayer might pass and 
repass with confident, golden feet for ever. . . . 
But from which side did the bridge spring ? 
Who moved toward the reconciliation ? It is 
the most precious part of our belief that it was 
with God that the activity began. It is the 
very soul of the Gospel, as I read it, that the 
Father's heart, sitting above us in His holi- 
ness, yearned for us as we lay down here in 
our sin. And when there was.no man to make 
an intercession, He sent His Son to tell us of 
His love, to live with us, to die for us, to lay His 
life like a strong bridge out from the divine 
side of existence, over which we might walk, 
fearfully but safely, back into the divinity 
where we belonged. Through Him we have 
access to the Father. As the end was divine 
so the method is divine. As it is to God that 
we come, so it is God who brings us there. I 
can think nothing else without dishonoring 
the tireless, quenchless love of God. 1. 237. 

The exhibition of so great a love and mercy is 

a very deep abyss, 
And as it were a divine sea which can not be 

swum over, 
Yet in which the spiritual fishes, small and great, 
Whom Thou hast inclosed in the net of faith, 
Swim to and fro. Thomas a Kempis. 



APRIL 5 . 95 



T^HERE comes no real content to the seeker 
* after goodness until, behind all the pat- 
terns which hold themselves up to him with 
pride and boasting in their practicalness, at 
last he hears the voice of the sublime imprac- 
ticable standard, far out beyond them all, call- 
ing to him, " Be ye perfect as your Father in 
heaven is perfect/' Then the finite has heard 
the voice of the infinite to which it belongs, to 
which it always will respond, and straightway 
it settles down to its endless journey and goes 
on content. 

III. 121. 

I toil, but I must also climb; 
What soul was ever quite at ease 
Shut in by earthly boundaries ? 

I am not glad till I have known 
Life that can lift me from my own: 
A loftier level must be won, 
A mightier strength to lean upon. 

And heaven draws near as I ascend; 
The breeze invites, the stars befriend: 
All things are beckoning towards the Best: 
I climb to Thee, my God, for rest. 

Lucy Larcom. 



96 APRIL 6. 

T S it not wonderful to see how few sins in this 
* world are done flatly, fairly, blankly, as 
sins ? We carry our consciences by side at- 
tacks, by elaborate strategies and artifices. 
We almost never charge up in the face of our 
sense of right and take it by assault. It is a 
very rare thing, I think much rarer than we 
are often ready to suppose, for a man to say 
to himself, this thing is bad, bad and not 
good, certainly and necessarily nothing but 
bad, and yet I will do it. . . . Covetousness 
dresses itself in the decent robes of prudence, 
idleness calls itself innocence, prodigality goes 
garbed as generosity, they all masquerade 
through society and trap the souls of men. . . . 
We have our sins here all decently labelled, all 
decently clad. What if He came, the Spirit 
of all truth, and wiped out every false name 
and wrote up every true one! We tremble to 
think of what these walls must see. We 
should not dare look upon one another's 
shame, bowed down each with the supreme 
shamefulness of his own. 

VI. ii, 13. 



Into the truth of things, 
Out of their falseness rise, and reach thou, and 
remain. 

Browning. 



APRIL 7. 97 

If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
speak of 7)i\ 'self, — John vii . 17. 

I HAVE been struck by seeing how favorite 
a text that has become in our clay. . . . 
Many and many a soul has found that that was 
indeed the message that it needed. Turning 
away from vain disputes of words, leaving 
theological subtleties alone, just trying to 
turn what it knew of Christ into a life, it has 
found that it has become assured of His divin- 
ity, sure that His doctrine was of God. Such 
souls have not found that the thousand curious 
questions of theology were answered, and all 
the mystery rolled away out of the sky of 
truth. Christ did not promise that. But they 
have found what He did promise: that com- 
ing near to Him in obedience, they have been 
made sure of the true divinity that was in Him 
and in the teachings that he gave. . . . 

It is like all Christ's teachings, — one utter- 
ance of an essential universal truth. Every- 
where the flower of obedience is intelligence. 
. . . Obey Jesus with cordial loyalty and you 
will understand Jesus. Not by studying Him, 
but by doing His will, shall you learn how 
divine He is. Obedience completes itself in 
understanding. 

I. 32. 

For meek Obedience, too, is Light, 
And following that is following Him. 

James Russell Lowell. 

7 



98 APRIL 8. 



In the wilderness shall waters break out, and 
streams in the desert. — Is. xxxv. 6. 

A MAN loses his friend and he is sorry; he 
loses his property and he is crushed; he 
loses his health and he almost gives up; but 
there is a yet untasted woe of which that man 
knows nothing. . . . Let him find himself 
a sinner, let him stand guilty, guilty, without a 
plea, without a hope, just with his frightened 
and naked soul before the eye of God, and 
then in the conviction of sin, then he has found 
what suffering is. . . . He walks the valley 
of his misery and all is dark. And can this 
valley break forth into wells ? Can these dry 
pools be filled with water? . . . Tell me, 
all ye who, bowed down in the dust in the 
humiliation of your worthlessness, have heard 
there, with your face close to the ground, 
what you could never hear while you stood 
upright, the streams of pardon running sweet 
music down below, — tell me, is not the well of 
richest joy right here in the midst of the val- 
ley of completest sorrow ? — where sin abounded 
does not grace much more abound ? 

VI. 31. 

Yea, though I sin, my sin is not to death; 
In my repentance I have joy, such joy 
That I could almost sin to seek for it — 
Yes, if I did not hate it and abhor, 
And know that Thou abhorr'st and hatest it, 
And will'st, for an example to the rest, 
That Thine elect should keep themselves from 
it. 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 






APRIL 



99 



THE truth which God gives us is like the 
wheat that a bounteous country sends 
into the city. It is all the same wheat; but 
men go and buy it and eat it, and this same 
identical wheat is turned into different sorts 
of force in different men. It is turned into 
bartering force in one, and thinking force in 
another, and singing force in another, and 
governing force in another. It is made mani- 
fold as soon as it passes into men. So I think 
every minister finds that, as his disciples grow 
older, if he has really succeeded in getting the 
truth to be their truth, they grow into more 
various forms of Christian charity and useful- 
ness. Each grows more evidently to be not 
merely a Christian, but the Christian that God 
intended him to be. They think more. They 
think differently. The pure white light breaks 
itself to each in different colors. 

Let us rejoice in the clear individuality of 
maturing Christian life. Its one principle is 
still identical; and so it already prophesies 
heaven, where we are sure we shall be all 
different illustrations of the one same grace, 
showing different characters, set to different 
works, but all moved by one spirit — all illustra- 
tions of the one same grace still. n. 44, 45. 

Lord, make me one with Thine own faithful ones, 
Thy Saints who love Thee, and are loved by 

Thee, 
Till the day break and till the shadows flee, — 
At one with them in alms and orisons; 
At one with him who toils and him who runs, 
And him who yearns for union yet to be. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



ioo APRIL 10. 

One star differ eth from another star in glory. 

i Cor. xv. 41. 

CVERY man who is a Christian must live a 
*— ' Christian life that is peculiarly his own. 
Every candle of the Lord must utter its pecul- 
iar light; only the true individuality of faith 
is marked by these characteristics which res- 
cue it from bigotry: first, that it does not add 
something to the universal light, but only 
brings out most strongly some aspect of it 
which is specially its own; second, that it 
always cares more about the essential light 
than about the peculiar way in which it utters 
it; and third, that it easily blends with other 
special utterances of the universal light, in 
cordial sympathy and recognition of the value 
which it finds in them. Let these character- 
istics be in every man's religion, and then the 
individuality of faith is an inestimable gain. 
Then the different candles of the Lord burn in 
long rows down His great palace-halls of the 
world; and all together, each complementing 
all the rest, they light the whole vast space 

with Him. 

II. 14. 

" Slender the streams of good 
That flow from the lives of men, 

But united they swell to a gracious flood 
That blesseth again and again." 



APRIL ii. 101 



And the multitudes that went before, and that 
followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of 
David ; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of 
the Lord. . . .And when He was come into Jeru- 
salem, all the city was 7?ioved, sayi?ig, Who is this ? 

Matt. ix. 10. 

SO Jesus came into Jerusalem. He came at 
once as an Intruder and a King. There 
were men . . . who made the old streets ring 
with shouts of welcome. There were other 
men who . . . with muttered curses saw 
Him go by in His triumph. But through it 
all Jesus held on His way, claiming the town 
for His town because it was His Father's. 

And so he claims our hearts. An Intruder 
and a King at once He seems to those hearts 
as He stands there on the threshold. There 
is something in every one of them that says to 
Him, "Come in, come in!" There is some- 
thing, too, in every one of them that rises up 
at His coming and says, "Begone, begone! 
We will not have this Man to rule over us." 
But through their tumult, their struggle, 
Christ, whether He be King or Intruder, 
whether He be welcomed or rejected, goes on 
His way, pressing on into each heart's most 
secret places, claiming always that He and He 
alone is the heart's King. VII. 220. 

Lord, we would fain some little palm-branch lay 

Upon Thy way . . . 
If but the foldings of Thy garment's hem 

Shall shadow them, 
These worthless leaves which we have brought and strewed 

Along Thy road 
Shall be raised up and made divinely sweet, 

And fit to lie beneath Thy feet. 

Susan Coolidge. 



102 APRIL 12. 

He goeth before you into Galilee. 

Matt, xxviii. 7. 

THIS is Christ's way. Wherever He would 
have His disciples go, He goes first Him- 
self, and through the door which He has 
opened He draws them by His love. That is 
the whole philosophy of Christian culture. 
And that is the meaning of the Incarnation. 
God entered into human life; made Himself 
one with it as He only could have done with 
a nature that was originally one with His own. 
He became man as He eould not have become 
brute or stone. Then in that human nature 
He outwent humanity. He opened yet un- 
opened gates of human possibility. He 
snowed what man might be, how great, how 
god-like ! And by the love and oneness He has 
always been claiming man for the greatness 
whose possibility He showed. As we think 
of the Incarnation deeply, these three stages 
come in one thought. First, the God in Christ 
seems very near to us as we think of His love. 
Then He seems very far above us as we think 
of His holiness, and then again He seems to 
bring us very near to Himself as we feel His 
power. He is one with us. He goes beyond 
us, and He comes again and receives us unto 
Himself. VI. 179. 

Ah, the dear message that He gave her then, 

Said for the sake of all bruised hearts of men ! 

" Go, tell those friends who have believed on Me, 

I go before them into Galilee : 

" Into the life so poor, and hard, and plain, 
That for a while they must take up again, 
My presence passes. Where their feet toil slow, 
Mine, shining-swift with love, still foremost go." 
Adeline D, T. Whitney. 



APRIL 13. 103 

Who is among you that fear eth the Lord, . . . 
that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let 
him trust in the name of the Lord, a7id stay upon 
his God. — Is. i. 10. 

" \I 7HAT shall I do with this sorrow that 
* * God has sent me ? " " Take it up and 
bear it, and get a strength and blessing out of 
it." " Ah, if I only knew what blessing there 
was in it, if I saw how it would help me, then I 
could bear it like a plume ! " " What shall I 
do with this hard, hateful duty which Christ 
has laid right in my way?" "Do it, and 
grow by doing it." "Ah, yes; if I could only 
see that it would make me grow! " In both 
these cases do you not see that what you are 
begging for is not more faith, although you 
think it is, but sight ? You want to see for your- 
self the blessing in the sorrow, the strength in 
the hard and hateful task. Faith says not, 
" I see that it is good for me, and so God must 
have sent it," but " God sent it, and so it 
must be good for me." 

V. 351. 

Hast thou forgotten that we walk by faith ? 
For keenest sight but multiplies the shows. 
Lift up thine eyelids; take a valiant breath; 
Fearful, dare yet the terror in God's name; 
Step wider, trust the Invisible. 

George Macdonald. 



104 APRIL 14. 

Father, save me from this hour : But for this 
hour came I into the world. Father, glorify Thy 
name. — John xii. 27, 28. 

NO duty of doing frightens and dismays the 
human soul like the duty of mere suffer- 
ing. I know nothing that will so cow and 
crush a strong, well man, with the red blood 
riotous in his full veins, as a certain convic- 
tion coming suddenly upon him that he is to 
be a poor, miserable, dependent invalid all 
the rest of his days until he dies. Nothing 
makes a man cry out to die like that. It is the 
most terrible sight one ever sees. . . . And 
then it is the most beautiful sight one ever 
sees. As the man lies there in his misery, out 
of the darkness comes his past and reads itself 
to him. Each bright old year of health comes 
with its message of God's unforgetting 
love. . . . He slowly sees that all the past 
of active duty was stocking his life with the 
graces that should fit him for these slow years 
of suffering duty. This bed of wretchedness 
was the result to which every path of educa- 
tion led. Slowly his soul accepts the lesson. 
"Father, save me from this hour. Nay, for 
this purpose came I unto this hour. Father, 
glorify Thy name." Then the hands drop 
patiently from their resistance. The meek 
lips are put up to taste the bitter cup. The 
life grows happy in its new enlightenment of 
pain. 

"* ' Glory to God, to God ! ' he saith ; 

1 Knowledge by suffering entereth, 

And life is perfected by death.' " 

VII. 223. 



APRIL 15. 105 

/ am the bread of life. 

He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me. 

John vi. 35, 57. 

TO feed on Christ is to get His strength into 
us to be our strength. You feed on the 
cornfield and then go and build your house, 
and it is the cornfield in your strong arm that 
builds the house, that cuts down the trees and 
piles the stone and lifts the roof into its place. 
You feed on Christ and then go and live your 
life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, 
that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that 
fights the battle, and that wins the crown. 

But what is this strength of Christ that 
comes to us ? It is His character, — His 
strength, His purity, His truth, His merciful- 
ness, — in one word, His holiness, the perfect- 
ness of His moral life. That is the inner 
strength. That is the strength of food. 

And notice how this last alone is vital. It 
alone makes life. It lives. The buttress keeps 
the dead wall standing, but the sap makes the 
live tree still more alive w T ith growth. So com- 
pulsion and fear keep us true to duty, but love 
makes us larger and fit for greater duty every 
day. Every vital strength must be the strength 
which incorporates itself with the very being of 
the thing that it supports. Except we eat we 
can have no life in us. II. 246, 242. 

Lord, evermore give us this bread. — John vi. 34. 

Lord, leave us not athirst, unfed, . . . 
Until, these mortal needs all past, 
We sit at Thy full feast at last, 
The bread of angels broken by Thee, 
The wine of joy poured constantly. 

Susan Coolidge. 



io6 APRIL 16. 



Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man. 

John xix. 5. 

THINK of Christ's life and death, not with 
reference to the mysterious redemptive 
efficacy that was in it, but as the great human 
life, the representative life that set forth the 
ideal experience and culture of a human soul. 
And surely it does not fail us here. Whatever 
else comes to a life, there is a final grace and 
greatness which it cannot have until it has 
been touched by pain. I do not speak it 
sentimentally. I do not mean the mere pa- 
thetic romance which gives a charm to the 
story of the unfortunate. I mean the very 
stuff and qualities of our manhood — those 
things which make us really and completely 
men. . . . Maturity of character is as sure a 
sign of some healthy experience of pain, how- 
ever secret, as the brilliancy and clearness of 
a bit of glass is of the fire through which it 
has passed. 

We do not dishonor the humanity of Jesus 
when we thus make it the type of what ours 
may be. He wanted and He loves to have us 
use it so. " As I am, so are ye in this world," 
He declared. Only remember He is not only 
pattern, but power. We must be like Him, 
but we cannot be, save as He makes us. We 
must come to Him, but we can only come to 
Him by His grace and help. yil. 11, 12. 

Thou art our Pattern to the end of time, 
Oh Crucified! and perfect is Thy will: 

The workers follow Thee in doing good; 
The helpless think of Calvary, and are still. 

Caroline M. Noel. 



APRIL 17. 107 



THE broken edges everywhere! The half- 
* finished tasks that men have to leave and 
go into the darkness! The young careers so 
full of promise that suddenly stop ! The great 
ideas and wishes, growing legitimately out of 
earthly life, yet evidently too large for it, find- 
ing no satisfaction here! And most of all the 
unfinished characters! I can think that it is 
no great thing for a man to die with his for- 
tune half made, or his barn half built; but 
that he should die just as his character is 
rounding into shape, and from a crude study 
becoming a picture of beauty and an engine of 
power, this is what most bewilders us. This 
is what most of all, I think, has made men 
guess that this earthly life we see is a part and 
not a whole, and set their eyes pathetically 
searching for that other world they thought 
must be beyond the waters. 

XI. 15. 

Still must we hope what we believe, 
And what is given us receive; 
Must still believe, for still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope 
What here is faithfully begun 
Will be completed, not undone. 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 



io8 APRIL 18. 



If after the manner of meii I have fought with 
beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the 
dead rise not? — i Cor. xv. 32. 

YOU can test the work that you are en- 
gaged in in the world by seeing whether 
it needs, whether it is restless and cramped 
without the truth of, an immortality. If it is 
not, if you can do your little fight just as well 
without any hope of an eternity, be sure the 
.fight that you are at is a poor one, is not 
worthy of your highest powers — is too small a 
fight for a man, a child of God, to spend his 
life in fighting. 

The world's poor heart knows very well 
what it wants. For years and years it longed 
to see one man rise from the dead. If it could 
only have that! It could let many other ques- 
tions go unanswered, but, oh, for some light 
on that darkness — oh, for some sound out of 
that silence! If it could have that, then its 
bonds would be broken, its whole pale life 
flooded with color, its best truths verified com- 
pletely, and a hope lighted upon every grave. 
No longer should spiritual philosophy labor 
under the burden of materialism; no longer 
should the dying die in terrible doubt, and the 
mourners go hopelessly about the streets. My 
friends, the world's prayer is answered. A 
true man has risen from the grave. Life and 
immortality are brought to light. 

XII. 29. 

Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God! 

Whittiek. 



April 19. 109 

TTOW this "power of the resurrection" 
* * transfigures and changes not merely all 
internal, but all external things! . . . The 
world itself, even material nature — trees and 
fields and skies, noontimes and mornings, sun- 
sets and midnights — cannot be the same when 
they are found to be the education-place of a 
being with a destiny such as the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ makes known for man. They 
must bring moral meanings to that soul which 
this new truth of immortality exalts to be the 
monarch of the world. You say that this is 
poetry. There is no poetry on the earth like 
the Christian's faith, that most noble of all 
creative powers, "the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." 
And so it is the commonest Christian conscious- 
ness, belonging to all Christian minds in their 
several degrees, that to them, with their new 
life, the whole world of nature became new 
too, had new words to speak to them of God 
and of eternity, and that all through their 
lives there are times when the enlightened uni- 
verse becomes vocal, and its visible realities 
impart to them 

11 Authentic tidings of invisible things, 
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power. 
And central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation." 

VII. 283. 



no APRIL 20. 



Handle 7ne and see, for a spirit hath not flesh 
and bones as ye see me have. — Luke xxiv. 39. 

IN these words Christ after His resurrection 
appeals to His disciples to bear witness 
that He is a true living man, and not a dis- 
embodied spirit. He bids them use their 
human senses to discover that He is truly 
human like themselves. The words therefore 
may represent to us the perpetual appeal which 
Christ makes to our human consciousness and 
to the perceptions of mankind to recognize 
His true humanity. As He then offered His 
human body for the inspection of His disci- 
ples, and bade them own that it was truly a 
man's body, so He is always offering His 
whole human nature and calling on men to 
witness that He is truly human in thought and 
feeling and character, the pattern and fulfil- 
ment of humanity. 

There are two knowledges of Christ, one 
lower and one higher. The first knowledge 
brings us to obedience. The second knowl- 
edge is the power of spiritual growth. 

Into that higher knowledge may we all ad- 
vance; making Christ ours first, that in the 
end He may make us His. With reverent 
hands may we handle Him and see that He is 
truly manly, that He really wears our human- 
ity, that so we may through His humanity 
come to the Father God whom He reveals. 

II. 253, 269. 



APRIL 21. in 



In your patience possess ye your souls. . . . Your 
redemption draweth nigh. — Luke xxi. 19, 28. 

THE world is growing better — I know it. A 
great unceasing movement toward truth 
and goodness is carrying slowly forward ever 
the character of this great, mighty, mysterious 
humanity. How slow it is, but oh, how real 
it is, the study of the ages tells. And yet 
behold how the good causes fail. Behold how 
selfishness comes in to paralyze each great 
endeavor for the good of man. Alas for him 
w T ho only sees this surface fact; who does not 
feel beneath it all the heave and movement of 
the whole race forward toward goodness, 
toward God! To him who hears at once the 
tumult of moral failures all around him and 
the steady progress of the great moral success 
beneath him — to him the world becomes 
solemn and beautiful, pathetic and full of 
hope. For him despairing pessimism and silly 
optimism both become impossible. A divine 
optimism, which, while it dares not say, 
" Whatever is is best," devoutly says, "The 
best is strongest and shall ultimately conquer 
and use even the worst," becomes the habit 
of his life. Such was the optimism of Jesus. 
Such is the optimism of His disciples if they 
catch His spirit. VII. 206. 

Then life is — to wake, not sleep; 

Rise, and not rest; but press 
From earth's level, where blindly creep 

Things perfected more or less, 
To the heaven's height, far and steep. 

Browning. 



H2 April 22. 



THERE is a religion which finds the world 
unsatisfying, and so turns longingly, 
wistfully, pathetically, wearily to God. There 
is another religion which finds the world won- 
drously beautiful and good, yet always sug- 
gesting something more beautiful and better 
than itself, and this religion too turns to God, 
but glowingly, springingly, hopefully. The 
first religion starts from a sense of sin and 
comes to God for forgiveness. The second 
religion starts in a thankful joy, a sense of 
promise, and comes to God for fulfilment. 
The first starts with disgust at self, and so 
comes to love for God. The second starts in 
admiration of God, and so comes to forgetful- 
ness of self. 

IV. 136. 



Happy ! Yes; and wherefore 

Should I not be so ? 
Love Divine o'erhangeth 

All the way I go. 

Darkest shadow showeth 

Smiling sun behind; 
Where the sickle goeth, 

There the reapers bind. 

Happy ! Yes; and wherefore 

Should I not be so, 
Since by ways appointed 

Unto heaven I go? 

J. L. M. W. 



April 23. 113 

""THERE are many great and exultant mo- 
* ments in our lives; moments in which 
some new, heretofore unfelt motive takes us 
into its power, when some new work for us 
and some new power in us starts forth and 
makes life seem fresh and green, like a spring 
morning that forgets all the stains and storms 
that have gone before it. But among all such 
moments there is none that can compare with 
that in which duty passes into love — when 
morality, reaching itself out into eternity, as- 
serts its sameness of nature with the service 
that the glorified nature is to render to God in 
the heavenly city, so that the obligation of 
honesty in our bargains is seen to rest on the 
same sanctions and to be lustrous with the 
same beauty now that will belong to the sing- 
ing of the everlasting songs and the casting of 
the crowns before the Saviour's feet — the 
moment when our life thus knows Christ and 
the power of His resurrection. 

VII. 285. 

Something that leaps life's narrow bars, 

To claim its birthright with the hosts of 
heaven; 

A seed of sunshine that doth leaven 
Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars, 

And glorify our clay 

With light from fountains elder than the Day. 

James Russell Lowell. 



H4 APRIL 24. 

Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast 
given me, be with me where I am j that they may 
behold my glory. — John xvii. 24. 

BEFORE the words can soar into the high, 
pure meaning which belongs to them, 
we must remember what Christ's glory is which 
He wants us to see. Its essence, the heart 
and soul of it, must be His goodness. . . . 
And here the truth comes in, that in moral 
things only the like can see its like; only the 
good can really discern, appreciate, and under- 
stand goodness. That needs no proof. We 
see it every day. Men live alongside of the 
best saints the world possesses, do business 
with them, pass their whole lives with them, 
and never know that they are good. If we 
have ever made any advance in purity and 
unselfishness, has not the best of all its satis- 
faction been in this, that it has let us see some- 
thing new of the self-sacrifice and purity in 
other men which have been hidden from us? 
The higher we climb, the more the peaks open 
around us. Now apply all this to the Sav- 
iour's prayer that we may see His glory. 
His glory is His goodness. Only by growth 
in goodness can His goodness open itself to 
us. What is He praying for then ? Is it not 
that we might be like Him? So only can we 
see Him. It is His glory that He wants us 
to see, but, back of that, He wants us to be 
such men and women that we can see His 
glory. I. 308, 309. 

Walk with Him now ; so shall thy way be bright, 
And all thy soul be filled with His most glorious light. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



APRIL 25. 115 

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed 
to and fro, but . . . may grow up into Him in all 
things. — Ephes. iv. 14, 15. 

THE true faith which a man has kept up to 
the end of his life must be one that has 
opened with his growth and constantly won 
new reality and color from his changing ex- 
perience. ... It is the field that once held 
the seed, now waving and rustling under the 
autumn wind with the harvest that it holds, 
yet all the time it has kept the corn. The joy 
of his life has richened his belief. His sorrow 
has deepened it. His doubts have sobered 
it. His enthusiasms have fired it. His labor 
has purified it. His doctrines are like the 
house that he has lived in, rich with associa- 
tions which make it certain that he will never 
move out of it. His doctrines have been illus- 
trated and strengthened and endeared by the 
good help they have given to his life. And 
no doctrine that has not done this can be 
really held up to the end with any such vital 
grasp as will enable us to carry it with us 
through the river and enter with it into the new 
life beyond. 

I. 62. 

O x\lmighty God, who hast instructed Thy holy Church 
with the heavenly doctrine of Thy Evangelist Saint Mark ; 
Give us grace that, being not like children carried away 
with every blast of strange doctrine, we may be established 
in the truth of Thy holy Gospel ; through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. Amen. 

. Book of Common Prayer. 



n6 APRIL 26. 



DESPERATION and bitterness come with 
the sight of pain without the sight of the 
higher consequences and results of pain. . . . 
" Curse God and die," seems sometimes to be 
the only outcome of it all. . . . It is the only 
outcome of it all, if the pain you see or feel is 
all. But if the whole of a man's life from its 
beginning to its endless end, from its surface 
to its inmost heart, is capable of being taken 
into account, then the desperate outcome is 
not the only one. There is a blessing and a 
thankfulness which may overcome and drown 
the curse. . . . Suppose that, looking at 
pain, and with the curse just growing into 
shape upon your lips, a great hand takes you 
up and lifts you. And as you rise your vision 
widens. And slowly education grows into 
your view, surrounding pain, and drawing out 
its sense of cruelty, and crowding in upon it its 
own sense of love and purpose. Then, in the 
larger vision, must not the curse perish ? And 
if the lips are not strong enough to open into 
thankfulness, at least the eyes, still full of 
pity, may wait in peace. 

VI. 221. 

The Way of the Just is made strait, and 
the journey of the Saints is prepared. 

After what manner ? 

By sorrow and labor; for this is the way to 
the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Is there no other way to the life Eternal 2 

None. The only straight way is that of the 
Cross. 

// is so. Christ hath taught this in His Word. 

Thomas A Kempis. 



APRIL 27. 117 

We live by admiration, hope and love: 
And even as these are well and wisely fixed, 
In dignity of being we ascend. 

Wordsworth. 

\I7HAT does it mean when men as they 
* * grow older become narrow, sordid, and 
machine-like, when a vulgar self-content 
comes over them, and all the limitations of a 
finished life that hopes for and expects no 
more than what it is makes the sad picture 
which we see in hosts of men's middle life ? 
Is it not certainly that those men have 
ceased to admire and trust ? . . . The blight 
that falls upon their natures is the token of 
what a lofty and life-giving faculty it is which 
they have put out of use. It was this faculty 
which made them at every moment greater 
than themselves, which kept them in com- 
munion with the riches of a higher life, which 
preserved all the enthusiasm of active energy, 
and yet preserved humility which held all the 
other faculties to do their best work. This is 
the faculty whose disuse makes the mature 
life of so many men barren and dreary, and 
whose regeneration, when the man is lifted up 
into the new admiration and the new trust, the 
admiration for and trust in God, makes a large 
part of the glory of the full-grown life of 
faith. VI. 95, 96. 



n8 APRIL 28. 



EVERY now and then there are flashes of 
light upon the Gospel page which let 
us see what a bright, sunny, and sympathetic 
life the Saviour lived, — how perfectly free from 
harshness and asceticism was that character 
which, at the same time, carries a sweet and 
gentle seriousness and a robust earnestness 
with it wherever it went. " The Son of man 
came eating and drinking, and they say, Be- 
hold, a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a 
friend of publicans and sinners," — so Jesus 
himself described one day the current impres- 
sion that His life made on the people of Jerusa- 
lem. The words are like an instantaneous pho- 
tograph of that far distant time. . . . In those 
words we can see friends and enemies alike 
busied with the strange life of Jesus, and only 
gradually finding out that it was they who 
were strange, and not He,— gradually coming 
first to feel and then to understand that this life 
of His, so bright and yet so serious, so individ- 
ual and yet so social, had reached completely 
what their lives were only crudely struggling 
after. VIII. 86. 

We would see Jesus! not alone in sorrow, 
But we would have Him with us in our 
mirth; 
He at whose right hand there are joys for ever, 
Doth not disdain to bless the joys of earth. 
Anna E. Hamilton. 

Let us never be afraid of innocent joy. God is good, 
and what He does is well done. We must dare to be 
happy . . . regarding ourselves always as the depositaries, 
and not as the authors of our joy. Ami el. 



APRIL 29. 119 

He giveth power to the faint, and to them that 
have no might He increaseth strength. — Is. xl. 29. 

DO you know what it is to be failing every 
day, and yet to be sure — humbly but 
deeply sure — that your life is, as a whole, in 
its great movement and meaning, not failing, 
but succeeding ? You want to do that best 
work that a man can do — to make life brighter 
and nobler for your fellow-men. Not a day 
passes in which you do not somehow try to 
do that blessed work; but every time you turn 
away after one of those attempts to give sym- 
pathy or inspiration to your brethren, how your 
heart sinks, so cold and so ignoble are the 
words which you meant to be so generous and 
warm ! And yet all the while you know that 
the whole life does not fail. Still there is the 
purpose ! It does not die. It is not given 
up. It presses forward, wounded and bleed- 
ing, but more and more determined every day. 
Every day it grows clearer and clearer to you 
that without that wish and hope and resolu- 
tion iife would not be worth living. 

VII. 40. 

That Thy full glory may abound, increase, 
And so Thy glory shall be formed in me, 
I pray: the answer is not rest or peace, 
But charges, wants, anxieties; . . . 
But all my life is blossoming inwardly, 
And every breath is like a litany, 
While through each labor, like a thread of gold, 
Is woven the sweet consciousness of Thee. 

Susan Coolidge. 



120 APRIL 30. 

Some falls are means the happier to rise. 

Shakespeare. 

THERE is a verse of one of the subtlest and 
truest of the English poets of our time 
which expresses so perfectly this idea of the 
relation between final success and the failures 
which precede it that I quote it to you: . . . 

" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking - , 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main." 

The noisy waves are failures, but the great 
silent tide is a success. The waves are borne 
upon the bosom of the tide; they share its 
motion; nay, the failure of each of them in 
some degree is a reaction of the tide's motion 
as it is cast back from the beach. But all the 
time the tide is succeeding while the waves are 
failing. The failures are carried on the bosom 
of a success which is present underneath them 
all the time. A life might be succeeding in 
the struggle after goodness even while every 
effort of the man who lived that life to be good 
fell so far short of what he wanted it to be that 
he could call it nothing but a failure. The 
purpose, the consecration, of the life to God 
and goodness is its tide. The special strug- 
gles to do good things are the waves. The 
deep, persistent, and unchanging hate of the 
peculiar sin, which is determined never to be 
reconciled to it and to fight against it till it 
dies — that is the soul's success, which does not 
falter or stop, and which carries along upon it 
all the partial failures of which the life is full. 

VII. 197, 198, 201. 



MAY i. 121 

Philip saith unto him, Come and see. 

John i. 46. 

THIS was the admirable wisdom of Philip. 
What had converted him was the personal 
sight of Jesus. He has no other religion but 
that. . . . Jesus was His own evidence. To 
get his friend face to face with Jesus — this was 
his object. . . . 

Christianity offers to the world her historic 
Christ. . . . Back in the centuries, yet set so 
clearly in the light of authentic history that 
all attempts to melt His life into a cloudy myth 
have always failed, there stands this figure. 
She claims that this Being to whom she points 
is the power and wisdom of God present upon 
the earth. You hesitate and doubt. Then 
11 Come and see," she says. Put yourself in 
the presence of this Being. . . . Ennoble hu- 
manity as completely as you will, and it will 
not explain this phenomenal character and 
life. . . . She says it is God manifest in the 
flesh. Come, and find another explanation, 
if you can. Come, and if there is no other to 
be found, take this and own the divine 
Christ. VI. 139, 144. 

Behold Him now where He comes ! 

Not the Christ of our subtile creeds, 
But the Lord of our hearts, our homes, 

Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; 
The Brother of want and blame, 

The Lover of women and men, — 
With a love that puts to shame 

All passions of mortal ken. 

Richard Watson Gilder. 



122 MAY 2. 

As the Father knoweth nie, even so know I the 
Father. — John x. 15. 

THE words are full of that idea of mutual- 
ness which gives so much of warmth and 
richness to all life. Any relation which is all 
one-sided is unsatisfactory and dull. It is not 
vividly interesting. We love to think of any 
two objects, any two beings which have to do 
with one another as ministering each to each, 
each sending to the other something in answer 
to that which it receives. That fills the rela- 
tionship with motion, and with motion come 
light and heat. The sun and the earth, the 
insect and the plant, the nation and the citi- 
zen, the teacher and the pupil, the parent and 
the child, the air which, filled with light, gives 
to the light its substance and its swiftness, — in 
every relationship there is this principle of re- 
ciprocity. Nothing alone is thoroughly alive; 
all complete life subsists in the reaction of mu- 
tuality. To give is never perfect life; it needs 
the complement, the fulfilment of taking. To 
take is never perfect life; it needs the comple- 
ment, the fulfilment of giving. 

IV. 283. 



O Jesus, who lovest us all, stoop low from 
Thy glory above: 

Where sin hath abounded make grace to abound 
and to superabound, 

Till we gaze on Thee face unto Face, and re- 
spond to Thee love unto Love. 

Christina G, Rossetti. 



MAY 



Shall we serve Heaven 

With less respect than we do minister 

To our gross selves ? 

Shakespeare. 

YOUR Christian duties, the prayers you pray, 
the self-denials that you practise, the 
charities you give, — what is the matter with 
them ? . . . You serve yourself, and how clear 
you are to yourself, and so, what life there is in 
every act of your own service; but you serve 
Christ and how dim He has grown ! and so, 
how listlessly the hands move at His labor ! 
Now if the Holy Spirit can indeed bring Him 
clearly to you, is not the Holy Spirit what you 
need ? And this is just exactly what He does. 
I find a Christian who has really " received the 
Holy Ghost," and what is it that 'strikes and 
delights me in him ? It is the intense and in- 
timate reality of Christ. . . . His whole life 
is light and elastic with this buoyant desire of 
doing everything for Jesus, just as Jesus would 
wish it done. So simple, but so powerful! So 
childlike, but so heroic! Duty has been trans- 
figured. The weariness, the drudgery, the 
whole task-nature, has been taken away. Love 
has poured like a new life-blood along the dry 
veins, and the soul that used to toil and groan 
and struggle goes now singing along its way, 
The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by 
the faith of the Son of God who loved nie and 
gave Himself for me. 

II. 228. 



124 MAY 4. 



CHRIST saw all life in God. That means 
that He saw life in its completeness. No 
being ever saw the evil and misery as He be- 
held it. He saw sin with all the intensity of 
holiness. But nobody ever has dared call 
Jesus Christ a pessimist. He saw the end from 
the beginning. He saw the depth from the 
surface. He saw the light from the darkness. 
He saw the whole from the parts. Therefore 
He could not despair. There was no curse of 
life upon His lips, but infinite pity ! A pity 
that has folded itself around the world's torn 
and bleeding heart ever since — but no curse ! 
And who are we, with our little feeble rage 
and petulance, flinging our testy curses where 
the Lord's blessing descended like the love of 
God? 

VI. 214. 



There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind 
Omnific. His most holy name is Love. 
Truth of subliming import ! — with the which 
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul, 
He from His small particular orbit flies 
With blest outstarting. From himself he flies, 
Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze 
Views all creation, and He loves it all, 
And blesses it, and calls it very good ! 

S. T. Coleridge. 



MAY 5. 125 

/ came not to send peace ', but a sword. 

Matt. x. 34. 

WE must think of Jesus as a soul undergo- 
ing experiences, living a life all through 
those years, or else the Gospels are a very- 
dead and barren book. And if we have known 
what it is to look forward and see, with a ter- 
ror which yet is glorified by hope, that the 
great purpose on which our heart is set is to 
be won only by first casting it, with seeming 
recklessness, away, — . . . then we can under- 
stand how the Rebuilder of human life about 
the fatherhood of God dwelt with pathetic cer- 
tainty upon the destruction that must come 
before that construction could begin. The 
more intensely He knew the preciousness of 
the end, the more necessary and the more ter- 
rible became the seeming sacrifice of that end 
before He must go to reach it. The more He 
gloried, with His heart full of the memories 
of heaven, in the prospect of the re-estab- 
lished family of God where each child should 
find his own distinctive childhood in the com- 
mon filial life of all, so much the more He 
saw with sadness, but with certainty, that the 
merely human groupings of men, in which 
each man lost his true self among his brethren, 
must be broken up. VIII. 102. 

Old thing's shall pass away ; 

The new shall come in abundance, 

The holy desires shall overflow, 

And rise up on every side where the cherishing spirit 

bloweth : 
There shall be no more fear, but love shall fill all ; 
For this change is from the right hand of God. 

Thomas A Kempis. 



126 MAY 6. 

THERE are those who seem to be doomed 
to most earthly toil; just to be conscien- 
tious, and upright, and thorough, and true. It 
seems as if that were everything for them. 
There are other men whose souls leap to tri- 
umphant thoughts, and whose eyes are open 
to ecstatic visions. . . . These two sorts of 
men belong together, make one world, are 
serving the purposes of one God, and making 
ready one celestial kingdom, and deserve 
each the other's whole-souled respect. It is not 
that the lesser man is making his life success- 
ful by making possible a higher life which 
some other man may live, though that is 
much. It is that in this universe, where natu- 
ral and spiritual succeed and minister to one 
another, he who at any spot is doing good 
work of any kind is serving the Universal 
Master and contributing to the universal suc- 
cess. 

VI. 257. 

Morning, evening, noon, and night, 
" Praise God ! " sang Theodite. 
Then to his poor trade he turned, 
Whereby the daily bread was earned. 

But ever at each period, 

He stopped and sang, " Praise God ! " 

Said Blaise, the listening monk, "Well done; 
I doubt not thou art heard, my son, 
As well as if thy voice to-day 
Were praising God the Pope's great way." 

Browning. 



MAY 7. 127 

There is o?ie glory of the moon, and another glory 
of the sun, and another glory of the stars. 

1 Cor. xv. 41. 

SAINT PAUL builds his argument for im- 
mortality upon the richness and the splen- 
dor of this mortal life. Often enough have 
men made heaven a compensation for the woes 
of earth. . . . Paul makes heaven not a com- 
pensation, but a development. Because this 
world is so glorious, therefore the glory of 
heaven must be surpassing and unspeakable. 
How much nobler is Paul's way ! How much 
fuller of inspiration and of genuine faith! . . . 
For he who finds in the manifold glories of 
this mortal life a symbol and witness of the 
glories which belong to immortality will al- 
ways be led to live this life as intensely and 
profoundly as he can, in order that the higher 
life may become real and attractive to him. 
Men have thought that they must separate 
themselves from earth in order that they 
might believe in heaven. Paul's doctrine 
says emphatically, "No! ' He says, "The 
deeper that you go in life, the more life must 
spread itself out around you and become 
eternity. He who gets to the centre feels the 
sphere." 

v. 59. 

Deep love lieth under 
These pictures of time; 

They fade in the light of 
Their meaning sublime. 

Emerson. 



i2§ MAY 8. 



Your joy no man taketh from you.— John xvi. 22. 

IN these words Christ declared that there was 
a joy which no man could disturb. There 
is a limit to our power over one another; 
there is a chamber of our inner selves where 
we may turn the key and no one can come 
in. . . . The very fact that there is such a 
limit interests us. We can see how good it is 
for a man's life that, while there should be 
great regions of his happiness which are in- 
volved with what other men are and do, there 
should be also other regions which no man but 
himself can touch. 

As I watch the growing life of the disciples, 
I see them coming to the best picture of what 
a human life ought to be, open and sensitive 
and sympathetic, and yet all the while self- 
respectful and independent; feeling other men 
and yet living their own life; as responsive as 
the ocean's surface to the winds of the living 
humanity which blew across them; and yet 
keeping, like the ocean, a calm and hidden 
depth which no storm upon the surface could 
disturb. III. 290, 293. 

O weary ways of earth and men ! 

O self more weary still ! 
How vainly do you vex the heart 

That none but God can fill ! 

These surface-troubles come and go 

Like rufHings of the sea; 
The deeper depth is out of reach 

To all, my God, but Thee. 

Faber. 



MAY 9. 129 

Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man 
taketh from you. — John xvi. 22. 

IT was a special joy, the inmost, the most 
secret and sacred of all joys which their 
Master promised. . . . And Jesus tells His 
disciples just what the power of this secret joy 
is to be. It is to be His presence with them: 
"I will see you again, and your heart shall 
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from 
you." Everything is based upon the associa- 
tion which they are to have with Christ their 
Master. There is nothing at all of self-suffi- 
ciency in what is promised. It is not that 
these men are to develop some interior 
strength, or to drift into some region of calm 
indifference where the influences of their fel- 
low-men shall not touch them any longer. It 
is that they are to come to a new life with 
Him. The new joy which is to enter into 
them, which they are to enter into, is to be 
distinctly a joy of relationship and not of self- 
containment, a joy which is to escape the in- 
vasion of the men who disturb all other joys 
by being held in the hand of a stronger being, 
out of which no earthly power shall be able to 
pluck it. 

III. 292, 294. 

He who has a relish for Thee, will he not 
find sweetness in everything ? 

And he that has no relish for Thee, what 
can be sweet to him ? 

Thomas a Kempis. 



130 MAY 10. 

Could not tins man y which opened the eyes of the 
blind, have caused that even this man should not 
have died 2 — John xi. 37. 

COULD not Christ have saved Lazarus 
from dying ? Could not Christ have 
saved you or me from perplexity or tempta- 
tion or doubt ? He could, because the power 
of life and death was in Him. . . . But if it 
were best for Lazarus to die, then Christ could 
not have caused that he should not have died. 
That is a sublime incapacity; to stand with 
the gift of life in the all-powerful hands, to 
see the cry for life in the eager eyes, to hear it 
in the dumb appeal of the terrified lips, and 
yet to say, " No, not life but death is best, " 
and so to be unable to give life, — that is a 
sublime, a divine incapacity. Could not Christ 
have answered your prayer ? No, He could 
not; not because the thing you asked for was 
not in His treasury, but because behind the 
question of His giving or refusing it there lay 
the fundamental necessity of His nature and 
His love, that He should do for you only the 
absolutely best. The thing you asked for was 
not absolutely best, therefore He could not 
give it. Back of how many unanswered prayers 
lies that divine impossibility ! 

V. 38. 

If He turn His face away, 

Never answering a word, 
When for some ill boon we pray, ... 
Blessed be His name for aye 

For the prayers He hath not heard. 

Katherine Tynan Hinkson. 



MAY il 131 

Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be 
turned into joy. — John xvi. 20. 

IT must be somewhere in the grief that the 
help of the grief is hidden. It must be in 
some discovery of the divine side of the sor- 
row that the consolation of the sorrow will be 
found. It is a wondrous change when a man 
stops asking of his distress, " How can I throw 
this off?" and asks instead, " What did God 
mean by sending this?" Then, he may well 
believe that time and work will help him. 
Time, with its necessary calming of the first 
wild surface-tumult, will let him look deeper 
and ever deeper into the divine purpose of the 
sorrow, will let its deepest and most precious 
meanings gradually come forth so that he may 
see them. Work, done in the sorrow, will 
bring him into ever new relations to the God in 
whom alone the full interpretation and relief 
of the sorrow lies. Time and work, not as 
means of escape from distress, but as the hands 
in which distress shall be turned hither and 
thither that the light of God may freely play 
upon it; time and work, so acting as servants 
of God, not as substitutes for God, are full of 
unspeakably precious ministries to the suffer- 
ing soul. But the real relief, the only final 
comfort, is God; and He relieves the soul al- 
ways in its suffering, not from its suffering; 
nay, he relieves the soul by its suffering, by 
the new knowledge and possession of Himself 
which could come only through that atmos- 
phere of pain. 

II. 279. 



132 MAY 12. 

THERE is something very beautiful to me 
in the truth that suffering, rightly used, 
is not a cramping, binding, restricting of the 
human soul, but a setting of it free. It is not 
a violation of the natural order, it is only a 
more or less violent breaking open of some 
abnormal state that the natural order may be 
resumed. It is the opening of a cage door. 
It is the breaking in of a prison wall. This is 
the thought of those fine old lines of an early 
English poet: 

" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. 
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become 
As they draw near to their eternal home." 

Oh, how many battered cottages have thus 
let in the light ! How many broken bodies 
have set their souls free, and how many shat- 
tered homes have let the men and women who 
sat in darkness in them see the great light of 
a present God! " Stronger by weakness ! " 
" Who passing through the vale of misery use 
it for a well." 

VI. 30. 

Cast into the pit 
Of lonely sorrow, 
The suffering soul, 
Looking aloft, 
Sees with amaze 
In the daytime sky 
The light of stars. 

Richard Watson Gilder. 



MAY 13. 133 



WE paint our heroes fighting their battles 
in the clouds or in the depths. Types 
of power which can only be developed in 
supreme joy or supreme sorrow enthrall our 
imagination; and then some plain man comes 
who knows not either rapture or despair, who 
simply has his daily work to do, his friends to 
help, . . . his trials to bear, his temptations to 
conquer, his soul to save; and what a healthi- 
ness he brings into our standards, with what a 
genuine refreshment he fills our hearts. Be- 
hold how great are these primary eternal quali- 
ties — patience, hope, kindness, intelligence, 
trust, self-sacrifice. 

The arctic frost ! The torrid heat ! Behold 
the true strength, the real life of the planet is 
not in these. It is in the temperate lands that 
the grape ripens and the wheat turns calmly 
yellow in the constant sun. Blessed is the life 
which grows itself into the consciousness of 
how strong a man is who with the average 
powers of a man keeps his integrity and pur- 
ity, becomes ever more upright and pure, and 
also encourages the lives of other men. 

IV. 204. 

All service ranks the same with God: 

If now, as formerly He trod 

Paradise, His presence fills 

Our earth, each only as God wills 

Can work. God's puppets, best and worst, 

Are we; there is no last or first. 

Browning. 



134 MAY 14. 

To another he gave two talents. 

Matt. xxv. 15. 

T^HIS quiet, common-place, unnoticed man, 
* going his faithful way in his dull dress 
which makes no mark and draws no eye, doing 
his duty insignificantly and thoroughly, win- 
ning so unobtrusively at last his master's 
praise, ought to be interesting to us all. 

He ought to be interesting because he rep- 
resents so much the largest element in uni- 
versal human life. The average man is by far 
the most numerous man. The man who goes 
beyond the average, the man who falls short 
of the average, both of them, by their very 
definition, are exceptions. They are the out- 
skirts and fringes, the capes and promontories 
of humanity. The great continent of human 
life is made up of the average existences, the 
mass of two-talented capacity and action. 

IV. 194. 



God sows June fields with clover, and the 

world 
Broadcasts with common kindnesses, 
With plain, good souls that cheerfully fulfil 
Their homely duties in the common field 
Of daily life, ambitious of no more 
Than to supply the needs of friend or kin, 
Yet serve God's higher will to human hearts. 

Samuel Longfellow. 



MAY 15. 135 

Ignorance is the curse of God, 
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to 
heaven. 

Shakespeare. 

THOUGHT and the struggle after truth are 
the best joys of the best men. To follow 
out the lines of speculation and of revelation 
until they lead us near the heart of things, 
which yet we know that we can never perfectly 
reach; to make some few steps forward on the 
journey which stretches out before us, end- 
lessly tempting and interesting, into eternity; 
to add each day some new stone to the struc- 
ture whose lines already as they leave the earth 
prophesy an infinite height for the far top- 
stone, — he has not lived who has not felt this 
pleasure. He is not really living, however 
full he may be of warmth of feeling and of 
energy in action, who does not in some degree 
know what it is to crave ideas and knowledge, 
to seek for truth, and to delight in finding it. 

III. 302. 

The sequences of law 

We learn through mind alone; 
'Tis only through the soul 

That aught we know is known : 
With equal voice she tells 

Of what we touch and see 
Within these bounds of life, 
And of a life to be : 
Proclaiming One who brought us hither, 
And holds the keys of Whence and Whither. 
Francis Turner Palgrave. 



136 MAY 16. 

When the Spirit of truth shall come He shall 
guide you into all truth. — John xvi. 13. 

\I7E live in a redeemed world, — a world full 
* * of the Holy Ghost forever doing His 
work, forever taking of the things of Christ 
and showing them to us. That Christ so shown 
is the most real, most present power in this new 
Christian world. Men see Him, men talk with 
Him continually. They do not recognize 
Him ; they do not know what lofty converse 
they are holding ; but some day when, in some 
way, a man has become really earnest and 
wants to believe in the Son of God, and is 
asking, ''Who is He that I may believe on 
Him?" then that Son of God comes to him, 
— not as a new guest from the lofty heaven, 
but as the familiar and slighted friend who 
has waited and watched at the doorstep, who 
has already from the very first filled the soul's 
house with such measure of His influence as 
the soul's obstinacy of indifference would 
allow, and who now, as He steps in at the 
soul's eager call to take complete and final 
possession of its life, does not proclaim His 
coming in awful, new, unfamiliar words, but 
says in tones which the soul recognizes and 
wonders that it has not known long before, 
"Thou hast seen me. I have talked with 
thee." V. 211. 



MAY 17. 137 



Thrice Holy Faith ! whatever thorns I meet, 
As on I totter with unpractised feet, 
Still let me stretch my arms and cling to Thee, 
Meek nurse of souls through their long infancy. 

S. T. Coleridge. 

THERE is a large healthy hunger after be- 
lief which is as different from the morbid 
appetite of superstition, as health always is 
different from disease. There are men who 
want to believe, — who would rather believe 
than not, — when some great spiritual theory 
of the universe is offered them to account for 
its bewilderments and to help its troubles. 
The secret of their life seems to be this, that 
they are men deeply impressed with the infi- 
niteness of life. Does that seem vague and 
transcendental ? They are men who are al- 
ways conscious of the spiritual and unseen 
underneath the visible and material, — men 
who are always sure that there is a great re- 
gion of unknown truth which they ought to 
know, and who are restless after it. To such 
men all that they see presupposes things 
which they do not see. 

V. 207. 

Every natural flower which grows on earth 
Implies a flower upon the spiritual side, 
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow 
With blossoming causes, — not so far away 
But we whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared 
May catch at something of the bloom and 

breath, 
Too vaguely apprehended. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 



138 MAY 18. 



Again, the devil taketh Him up i?ito an exceed- 
ing high mountain and showeth Him all the king- 
doms of this world, and the glory of them. 

Matt. iv. 8. 

SO does the young man in some moment or 
some period of his life come in sight of 
the great world. ... It is all very vague — 
it must be. The traveler upon the road to 
London, all aglow with its vision, does not 
trace how every street and alley runs in the 
great city, nor see how the bricks are laid 
in every man's back yard. It is the " light 
of London," not the lamp in this or that 
shop-window, that he sees. And so it is 
the world, all vague, mysterious, and wonder- 
ful, which the spirit of the young man sees 
from his mountain, not this or that which is 
happening in the world. It is the world all 
together, the world of tumultuous, roaring, 
awful, fascinating human life, the kingdoms 
of the world, and the glory of them — this is 
what he sees. There is a special value, a 
special contribution to the total experience 
and character of a man, in the years which 
hold that vision — the years when the narrow- 
ness of childhood is broken, but the absorption 
in the details of life has not yet begun; these 
years wherein the young man is catching sight 
of the world. Blessed is he who keeps those 
years pure and lofty. 

VII. i68, 169. 



MAY 19. 139 

Watch and pray that ye enter not into tempta- 
tion. — Matt. xxvi. 14. 

OUR Lord's temptation makes us see that 
temptation is not sin, nor does it neces- 
sarily involve sin. Christ was sinless and yet 
tempted; therefore it is possible for man to be 
tempted and yet sinless. Now so many of us, 
the moment we are strongly tempted, seem to 
fall into a sort of demoralized condition, as if 
our innocence were over, as if the charm were 
broken and we were already sinners; and so 
we too often give ourselves up easily to the 
sin. . . . To any soul in such a state what 
could we say but this : " Look up and see the 
truth in Jesus ; do you not see it there ? To 
be tempted is not wicked, is not shameful, is 
not unworthy even of Him. It is the lot, in 
one view it is even the glory, of humanity. 
Sin does not begin and shame does not begin 
until the will gives way, until you yield to 
temptation. Stand guard over that will, resist 
temptation, and then to have been tempted 
shall be to you what it was to your Saviour — 
a glory and a crown, a part of your history 
worthy to be written with thanksgiving in the 
Book of Life, as His is written in His book of 
life." Is not this the strength and courage 
that many a soul needs ? VII. 133, 134. 

Pray 
" Lead us into no such temptations, Lord." 
Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold, 
Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
That so he may do battle and have praise. 

Browning. 



140 MAY 20. 



I T is good to multiply experiences. It is good 
* to do many things and to have manifold 
relations with the world. It is good to touch 
many people and to see many sights; but it 
is good, it is necessary, to be content with no 
experience which remains simply as experience 
and does not pass on and into character. 
Events are great if they make dispositions. 
The Natural is precious if " afterward," out of 
it, comes the Spiritual. The experienced man 
is happy, if he has really drunk the rain and 
sunshine of the experiences which have come 
to him into his heart and is the ripened man, 
otherwise he is only like the rock on which 
every passer-by has scrawled his name. 

VI. 254. 

And so shall bright patience 

And trustfulness teach 
Some wonderful alchemy, 

Turning to gold 
All things whatsoever 

That come in its reach — 
The dull and the narrow, 

The new and the old, — 
Till each shall be bright 

With the grace and the glow 
Of the goodness of God, 

Who loveth us so ! 

J. L. M. W. 



MAY 21. 141 



Be strong, . . . and work j for I am with you y 
saith the Lord of hosts, — Hag. ii. 4. 

THINK we want to urge most strenuously 
' upon young men the need, the absolute 
necessity, that in the appointed and demanded 
work of their life they should look for and 
should find the joy of their life. To do your 
work because you must ; to do your work as 
a slavery ; and then, having got it done as 
speedily and easily as possible, to look some- 
where else for enjoyment, — that makes a very 
dreary life. No man who works so does the 
best work. No man who works so lingers 
lovingly over his work and asks himself if there 
is not something he can do to make it more 
perfect. " My meat is to do the will of Him 
that sent me, and to finish His work," said 
Jesus. 

II. 32. 

Go from the east to the west, as the sun and 

the stars direct thee, 
Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass 

the earth; 
Not for the gain of the gold, the getting, the 

hoarding, the having, 
But for the joy of the deed, but for the duty 

to do. 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 



t42 MAY 22. 

Man, if he do but live within the light 
Of high endeavors, daily spreads abroad 
His being armed with strength that cannot fail. 

Wordsworth. 

T^HERE are many among us who feel the 
* need to have the labor of our life re- 
deemed, — merchants, clerks, lawyers, labor- 
ers, teachers, housekeepers, one thing or an- 
other, — the chosen or fated task of our life so 
often seems to be mere drudgery, crowding us 
down, pressing the life out of us. . . . What 
you need is some purpose beyond. What 
shall it be ? . . . If you can do your work 
for a friend or for a family as well as for your- 
self, you have already redeemed much of its 
sordidness. If you can do it for a cause, for 
the progress of society and the improvement 
of business, for your country, for your church, 
then you have lifted it still more. If you can 
do it for God, in perfect, childlike, loving de- 
sire for His glory, then your work, be it as 
heavy in its nature as it may, leaps of itself 
from the low ground, and, instead of crush- 
ing you with it to the earth, carries you up 
every day into the presence of the God for 
whom you did it. 

VI. 52, 53. 

Ye know that your labor is 7tot in vain in the 
Lord. — 1 Cor. xv. 58. 



MAY 23. 143 



/ shall shew you plainly of the Father. 

John xvi. 25. 

WHEN we want to gather into one great 
comprehensive statement the purpose 
for which Jesus lived, and the power which 
His life has had over the lives of men, we 
must seize His great idea and find His power 
there. . ." . His power is not in the miracles 
that He did, not even in the marvellous 
nature that He bore, but in the great truth, 
the primal and final fact of the universe, 
so far as man has any part in it, which the 
whole nature of the Saviour uttered. . . . 
That idea is the relation of childhood and 
fatherhood between man and God. Alan is 
the child of God by nature. He is ignorant 
and rebellious, — the prodigal child of God; 
but his ignorance and rebellion never break 
that first relationship. It is always a child 
ignorant of his Father; always a child rebel- 
lious against his Father. That is what makes 
the tragedy of human history, and always pre- 
vents sin from becoming an insignificant and 
squalid thing. To reassert the fatherhood and 
childhood as an unlost truth, and to reestablish 
its power as the central fact of life; to tell men 
that they were, and to make them actually be, 
the sons of God, — that was the purpose of the 
coming of Jesus, and the shaping power of 
His life. VIII. 12, 13, 14. 

Who knows God's fatherhood 
Knows he rides safe, however tempest-tossed: 
There is no darkness ; in love's light 'tis lost. 

S. W. Weitzel. 



144 MAY 24. 



Ask, and ye shall receive. — John xvi. 24. 

We kneel how weak, we rise how full of power ! 
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, 
Or others, that we are not always strong, 
That we are ever overborne with care, 
That we should ever weak and heartless be, 
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, 
And joy, and strength, and courage are with thee? 

R. G. Trench. 

PURE humanitarianism and pure fatalism 
can neither of them pray. But let us 
have a world where the Creator's glory and the 
creature's good are like sound and echo, like 
sunlight and reflection to each other ; where 
every advance in one chronicles and repeats it- 
self in the other ; let man by sovereign mercy 
be admitted into such an intimacy with his 
God, and then prayer — what is it ? What 
but the answer of the echo to the sound, the 
uttered sympathy of the one common life, 
man responding to God's "Be happy, O my 
child!" with an ever grateful and reverent 
" Be glorious, O my Father ! " As we go up 
higher in the new life prayer becomes less ser- 
vile and so becomes more true. When the 
new life is finished, the sympathy complete in 
heaven, who can say what prayer will be ? It 
will be what Christ's was, in His perfect human- 
ity talking with the perfect Divinity to which 
it stood so near. There will be no wandering 
eyes, no listless thoughts, no formal words, no 
hearts that pray because they must; but souls 
alight with a new likeness shall leap into a new 
nearness to their God, and prayer be heaven 
to the perfected human life. God's glory and 
man's good — who will divide them there ? 

VII. 233. 



MAY 25. 145 



Remember how short my time is. 

Ps. lxxxix. 47. 

IF a man is able to conceive of immortal- 
ity; if he can picture to himself a being 
who can live forever; if he recognizes in him- 
self any powers which can outlast and laugh 
at death, — then any limit of life must seem 
narrow; against the broad background of the 
whole, any part must seem small. On the 
blue sky the almost million miles of the sun's 
breadth seem narrow. It is here that the 
truth about the matter lies. It is only by the 
dim sense of his immortality, only by the di- 
vine sight of himself as a being capable of 
long, long life, that man thinks his life on 
earth is short. Only by losing that divine 
sight of himself, and looking at himself as the 
beasts look at themselves, can he come to 
think his life long. The beast's life never 
seems short to him. Think of yourself as a 
beast and your life will never seem short to 
you. It is the divine consciousness in man, 
the consciousness that he is a child of God, 
that makes him know he is short-lived. Feel 
this, and is not the shortness of life the crown 
and glory of the race ? 

I. 318, 319. 



Courage! for life is hasting 

To endless life away : 
The inner life un wasting 

Transfigures thy dull clay! 

George Macdonald. 



146 MAY 26. 



A MEMORY which is not also a prophecy 
is terrible. . . . You recall the happy 
days of an old friendship. Unless it is a per- 
petual revelation to you of the perfect friend- 
ship of the perfect life it comes to be a tor- 
ture. 

1 * Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all ; " 

but the true blessedness is reached only when 
you know that that which you have seen 
plunged into the fiery furnace is to come out 
again, the same, but finer, purer, holier, more 
worthy of the child of God ! 

When we have really grasped this truth, 
then how interesting and impressive becomes 
the sight of the life of our fellow-men! Many 
and many of these men whom we see plodding 
on in their dusty ways are travelling with 
visions in their souls. Nobody knows it but 
themselves and God. Once, years ago, they 
saw a light. They knew, if only for a moment, 
what companionships, what attainments, they 
were made for. That light has never faded. 
It is the soul of good things which they are 
doing in the world to-day. It makes them 
sure when other men think their faith is gone. 
It will be with them till the end, until they 
come to all it prophesies. 

VII. 341, 342. 

The vision is yet for an appointed time, but at 
the end it shall speak, and not lie ; though it tarry, 
wait for it. — Hab, ii. 3. 



MAY 27. 147 



A CLOUD received Him out of their 
sight. ' ' Into mystery and a darkness to 
which His going there alone gives any true light 
our Saviour goes. But oh, my friends, when by 
and by our way leads also into mystery and 
darkness, when truth becomes covered with 
doubt, and joy with sadness, and life begins 
to feel the waiting death, what can help us 
like the faith of the ascended Jesus ? The 
way into the cloud may be a way up and not a 
way down, a way toward Him and not a way 
from Him. Doubt, sorrow, death — these may 
be, these to the true soul must be, like the 
clouds over the Mount of Olives through which 
the Son of God went up to the right hand of 
His Father. "We which remain shall be 
caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in 
the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. 
Wherefore comfort one another" — comfort 
yourselves too, comfort and strengthen your- 
selves and one another — "with these words." 

VII. 301. 



Out to the earthward brink 
Of that great tideless sea 

Light from Christ's garments streams. 

Cowards that fear to tread such beams 

The angels can but pity when they sink. 

Believing thus, I joy although I lie in dust. . . 

Long as God ceases not, I cannot cease: 
I must arise. 

Helen Hunt Jackson. 



148 MAY 28. 

I go to prepare a place for you, . . . that where 
I am, there ye may be also, — John xiv. 2, 3. 

IF on some hitherto unexplored and unin- 
habited island far away in the seas a man 
goes to live, ... he clothes the island with 
intelligibleness. I can understand and realize 
its existence when I know that a human foot 
has been pressed upon its sandy beach. If he 
is a great, strong, notably manly man who 
goes there, carrying with him a large share of 
our humanity, then he gives the island more 
than intelligibleness. He gives it dignity. It 
is full of interest. . . . But if the man who 
goes there is my friend, and if he tells me that 
he is going to make it ready for my coming, 
that he will come back again and take me to 
it by and by, then how that island burns for 
me — the one live, real, shining spot in all the 
world ! It is the goal of all my thoughts, the 
lodestone of my hopes. I think of it until the 
familiar house in which I was born, and wher.e 
I am living still, seems strange to me com- 
pared with that one shining spot that has be- 
come so real. My friend's love makes it all 
glow and burn before me as if I myself already 
saw the sun shining on its mountain-tops and 
flashing on the surface of its rippling streams. 

VII. 300. 

So, when the times of restitution come — 
The sweet times of refreshing come at last — 
My God shall fill my longings to the brim ; 
Therefore I look and wait and long for Him : 
Not wearied, though the work be wearisome, 
Nor fainting, though the time be almost past. 
Christina G. Rossetti. 



MAY 29. 149 

LET us try, if we are really Christians who 
believe that Christ our Lord has "as- 
cended into heaven," to enter into His heav- 
enly life by the largeness and loftiness of the 
prayers that we bring to Him. God forbid 
that we should so misread His exaltation that 
we should hesitate to ask Him for the very 
smallest things; but the things that belong to 
our peace are what He wants to give us. The 
things that make this world and its interests 
seem small when we think of them : the for- 
giveness of sin, the perfect purification of our 
souls, the driving out of selfishness, the disre- 
gard of comfort in pursuit of duty, the care 
for brethren more than for ourselves; not 
comfort, not spiritual rest, not freedom from 
pain here or hereafter — not these, but the 
chance, the power, the will to glorify God our 
Father in our lives as He, the perfect Son, did 
in His — this we may ask if we believe in the 
Ascension and have understood the heavenly 
life of Him who is still our Brother and- 
Saviour. 

VII. 294. 



Beyond this shadow and this turbulent sea, 

Shadow of death and turbulent sea of death, 
Lies all we long to have or long to be. 

Take heart, tired man, toil on with lessen- 
ing breath, 
Lay violent hands on heaven's high treasury, 
Be what you long to be through life's long 
scathe. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



150 MAY 30. 

When the burnt offering began, the song of the 
Lord also began with the trumpets. 

2 Chron. xxix. 27. 

THE act of sacrifice was done with a chorus 
of delight. . . . Self-sacrifice, which is 
what these burnt offerings picturesquely rep- 
resented, is universally and perpetually neces- 
sary. . . . Can the life, too, be offered as 
the beast was of old, with song and trum- 
pet ? . . . There are always glimpses of 
man's highest life which show us, like the first 
streaks of light before the dawn, what it would 
be if all the sky were filled w T ith glory; and so 
there are always exalted lives, and exalted mo- 
ments in the lives, I hope, of all of us, in 
which we do catch sight of the joy and glory 
of self-sacrifice. Not many years ago, when 
the young men went to the war, was it not 
true that the fact of sacrifice intensified the 
joy ? It was a joy to save their country, to 
feel sure, as it is not often given to men viv- 
idly to feel, that they were doing a real and 
valuable part of her salvation. No safe and 
easy task could ever have filled the heart with 
such a sober and deep delight. 

II- 23, 25. 

'Tis no Man we celebrate, 
By his country's victories great ? . . . 
But the pith and marrow of a Nation 
Drawing force from all her men, 
Highest, humblest, weakest, all, 
For her time of need, and then 
Pulsing it through them again. 

James Russell Lowell. 



MAY 31. 151 



I saw the dead, small and great, stand before 
God. — Rev. xx. 12. 

|"QT. JOHN] saw what souls go to. We are 
LO so apt to see only what souls go from. 
When our friend dies we think of all the 
warm delights of life, all the sweet friend- 
ships, all the interesting occupations, all the 
splendor of the sunlight which he leaves be- 
hind. If we could only know, somewhat as 
John must have known after his vision, the 
presence of God into which our friend enters 
on the other side, the higher standards, the 
larger fellowship with all his race, and the new 
assurance of personal immortality in God; if 
we could know all this, how our poor com- 
fortless efforts of comfort when our friends 
depart, our feeble raking-over of the ashes of 
memory, our desperate struggles to think that 
the inevitable must be all right; how this 
would all give way to something almost like a 
burst of triumph, as the soul which we loved 
went forth to such vast enlargement, to such 
glorious consummation of its life ! 

IV. 72. 

Where chill or change can never rise, 
Deep in the depth of Paradise 
They rest world-wearied heart and eyes — 

Jubilate. 

Safe as a hidden brooding dove, 
With perfect peace within, above, 
They love, and look for perfect love — 

Hallelujah. 
Christina G. Rossetti. 



iS2 JUNE i. 

Only the anointed eye 

Sees in common things — 
Gleam of wave and tint of sky — 

Heavenly blossomings. 
To the hearts where light was birth 

Nothing can be drear; 
Budding through the gloom of earth, 

Heaven is always near. 

Lucy Larcom. 

[BELIEVE our lives are too prosaic. I 
think we might all live up in a purer 
air. ... I think the strange beauty of the 
nature all around us might be more fully 
grasped. I think that, made pure and strong 
by thoughts like these, we might all make our 
lives to poems: 

" Be good, be true, and let who will be clever ; 

Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ; 
And so make life, death, and that vast forever, 
One grand, sw r eet song." 

If it be poetry, as I think it is, to go out 
to-morrow morning with all our closets open 
and all our moral enginery in play, ready to 
see the miracle that the sun will bring up over 
the river and the hills once more, ready to 
learn the lesson of the earth — a work to do 
and manly strength to do it, — ready to sym- 
pathize with and worship all that is worthy of 
our sympathy and homage, ready to grow 
more godlike in our reverence for God — if this 
be poetry, then fifty poems may begin to-mor- 
row, with earth's grand music for them all to 
sing to, and heaven at last to crown the vic- 
tor with a sweet " Well done." 

X. 245, 246. 



JUNE 2 . 153 

Still are we saying, " Teach us how to pray " ? 
Oh, teach us how to love! and then our 
prayer 
Through other lives will find its upward way. 

TT E best finds God and is God's who finds 
* * Him and becomes His, not in separation 
from his brethren but in the certainty of God's 
love to all and of the belonging of all souls to 
God. ... If I prayed all alone, — my prayer 
the only prayer which pierced the darkness be- 
cause mine was the only soul which stood in 
need, — then I can possibly imagine that as I 
stood and looked I should behold the answer 
come like a white dove out of the distance 
until it laid itself upon my soul and gave it 
peace. But now I cannot help seeing what a 
far greater richness there will be if my peti- 
tion blends with a million others, and the an- 
swer comes in some great outpouring of the 
divine light and love which addresses itself to 
all the world. 

V. 12S. 



Nor nursing each our own distress, 

To Thee we press; 
Prayer's overflow drowns selfishness; 

Soul within soul, 
One voice to Thee our linked petitions roll; 
Healer of the world's hurt, oh, make us whole! 

Lucy Larcom. 



i54 JUNE 3. 

But He answered her not a word. 

Matt. xv. 23. 

SOME prayers Christ does not answer, we 
may say, because they ask Him to do our 
work for us. . . . Tell me, is there a kinder 
thing that you can do for your pupil who 
comes up to } t ou with his slate, asking you to 
work out for him his problem, than to bid him 
go back to his seat and do his task himself, 
and get that discipline and learning which is 
really the object of his having his task set to 
him at all ? You ask Christ to show you with 
a flash of lightning what your sorrow means. 
You ask him to reveal to you by some super- 
natural illumination which path of life you 
ought to take, which friendship you shall cul- 
tivate, what profession you can most success- 
fully pursue. There comes no answer to those 
prayers. . . . And why ? Those are your 
problems. It is by hard work of yours, by 
watchful vigilance, by careful weighing of 
consideration against consideration, that you 
must settle those things for yourself. 

V. 133. 

Not for thy neighbor nor for thee, 

Be sure, was life designed to be 

A draught of dull complacency. 

One Power too is it v/ho doth give 

The food without us, and within 

The strength that makes it nutritive. . . . 

So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see 

Defeat itself is victory. 

Arthur Hugh Clough, 



JUNE 4. i55 

If Thou be the Son of God, command that these 
stones be made bread. — Matt. iv. 3. 

DO you not see what the temptation was 
and what it is forever ? O my dear 
friend, God made these things, and made you 
to live by them, but not by them alone. Go 
on; gather the joy out of the earth and sky, 
out of the bread He gives you power to win, 
out of the water that He makes to gush at 
your feet; only, when the time comes — as it 
is sure to come some time, as perhaps it is to 
come now — when, in order to speak some word 
out of His mouth to you, some word of duty 
or charity or holiness, He takes these things 
away, and you are tempted to shut your ear to 
His word in order that you may keep these 
pleasant things, then you are just where Jesus 
was — the devil is at your ear. May God help 
you to see what Jesus saw — what He said after- 
ward, perhaps remembering His own tempta- 
tion: " The life is more than meat." May he 
help you to say, "No! Nothing — not even 
His gifts — shall blind or deafen me to Him. 
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
every word out of the mouth of God" — the 
blessed sacrifice of sense to spirit. 

VII. 143. 

To sacrifice, to share ; 

To give even as He gave ; 
For others' wants to care ; 

Not our own lives to save — 

The hidden manna this, 

Whereof who eateth, he 
Grows up in perfectness 

Of Christ-like symmetry. 

Lucy Larcom. 



i 5 6 JUNE 5, 

If any man thirst, let him come to 7ne and drink. 

John vii. 37. 

REMEMBER, it is not just compensation, 
but transformation that you are to seek. 
Not Heaven yet. That looms before us al- 
ways, tempting us on; but now the earth, with 
all its duties, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, and 
dangers. We want a faith, a truth, a grace to 
help us now, right here, where we are stum- 
bling about, dizzied and fainting with our 
thirst. And we can have it. One who was 
man, yet mightier than man, has walked the 
vale before us. When He walked it, he turned 
it all into a well of living water. To them 
who are willing to walk in His footsteps, to 
keep in His light, the well He opened shall be 
forever flowing. Nay, it shall pass into them 
and fulfil there Christ's own words: "Who- 
soever drin.keth of the water that I shall give 
him shall never thirst, but the water that I 
shall give him shall be in him a well of water 
springing up into everlasting life." 

VI. 34. 

I am the Fountain of Life, that cannot be 
exhausted. 

Whosoever is sorrowful, let him come to me 
that he may be comforted; 

Whosoever is dry, let him come that he may 
be filled with the richness and fulness of the 
Spirit; 

Whosoever is wearied, let him come that he 
may be refreshed with joy. 

Thomas a Kempis. 






JUNE 6. 157 

The communion of the Holy Ghost be with you 
alL — 2 Cor. xiii. 14. 

THE doctrine of the Holy Ghost is a contin- 
ual protest against every constantly re- 
curring tendency to separate God from the cur- 
rent world. A God who made the world and 
then left it to run its course under the tyranny of 
force and law; a God who redeemed the world 
eighteen centuries ago and left it to be blessed 
by or to miss the blessing of the redemption 
which He had provided — neither of these 
ideas of Deity can comprehend the truth of 
God the Holy Ghost. A present God, an 
ever-living God, an ever-pleading, ever-help- 
ing, ever-saving God — this is the God whom 
Christ told of and promised, the God who 
came in the miracle of Pentecost and is for- 
ever here. . . . Wherever men's dealings with 
each other, or men's value of each other, is 
colored with the influence of the truth that we 
live in a world full of God; wherever our 
communion with each other takes place through 
Him, the sacredness and usefulness of what 
we are to each other resulting from what He 
is to all of us, then our communion is a com- 
munion of the Holy Ghost. VII. 307. 

We faintly hear, we dimly see, 

In differing phrase we pray; 
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee 

The Light, the Truth, the Way. 

Thy litanies, sweet offices 

Of love and gratitude; 
Thy sacramental liturgies 

The joy of doing good. Whittier. 



158 JUNE 7. 

A friend, — it is another name for God, 
Whose love inspires all love, is all in all; 
Profane it not, lest lowest shame befall! 

Worship no idol, whether star or clod; 
Nor think that any friend is truly thine, 

Save as life's closest link with Love Divine. 

Lucy Larcom. 

ONE of the most valuable changes which 
comes to a human friendship when it is 
deepened into a communion of the Holy Ghost 
is the assurance of permanence which it ac- 
quires. There is always a lurking distrust and 
suspicion of instability in friendship which has 
not the deepest basis. No present certainty 
answers for the future. Present kindness only 
bears witness of present regard, and each new 
moment needs its new proof. How we have 
all felt this! 

" Alas that neither bonds nor vows 
Can certify possession ! 
Torments me still the fear that love 
Died in its last expression." 

This must be so to some degree with an affec- 
tion where each is held to each only by the 
continuance of personal liking. But when 
friendship enters into God, and men are bound 
together through their common union with 
Him, all the strength of that higher union au- 
thenticates and assures the faithfulness and 
perseverance of the love that is bound up with 
it. The souls that meet in God may well be- 
lieve that they shall hold each other as eter- 
nally as He holds each and each holds Him. 

VII. 312. 






JUNE 8. 159 

My peace I give unto you. — John xiv. 27. 

T KNOW that there is such a thing as peace 
* to seek and find. But here is my work to 
do, to worry over whether I am doing it right, 
to keep myself restless over how it will turn 
out. ' ' My work, ' ' I say ; but if I can know that 
it is not my work, but God's, should I not cast 
away my restlessness, even while I worked on 
more faithfully and untiringly than ever ? . . . 
If I could pour through all the good plan 
over which I am laboring the certainty that all 
that is good in it is God's and must succeed, 
how that certainty would drive the darkness 
out of it! and while I worked harder than 
ever, my work would have something of the 
calmness with which He labors always. . . . 

To every poor sufferer, to every discouraged 
worker, to every man who cannot think much 
of himself and yet is too brave to despair, this 
is the courage that the gospel gives. Not 
what you can do, but what He can do in you; 
not what you are, but what you can help men 
to see that He is — that is the power by which 
you are to work. 

VII. 49, 53- 



Lord, Thou wilt ordain peace for us ; for Thou 
also hast wrought all our works in us. 

Is. xxvi. 12. 



160 JUNE 9. 



We see but half the causes of our deeds, 
Seeking them wholly in the outer life, 
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world, 
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us 
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes. 
James Russell Lowell. 

OH, there are households among you where 
some son or daughter who is dead is 
stronger in the shaping of the daily life than 
any of the men and women who are still alive. 
His character is at once a standard and an in- 
spiration. . . . To say that he is not with you 
is to make companionship altogether a phys- 
ical, not at all a spiritual thing. To say that 
he is absent from you, and that the neighbor 
of whom you know nothing, for whom you 
care nothing and who cares nothing for you, 
is present with you, is to confuse all thoughts 
of neighborhood, to put the false for the true, 
the superficial for the deep. 

This is the difference of men- — those whose 
power stops with their death, and those whose 
power really opens into, its true richness when 
they die. The first sort of men have mechan- 
ical power. The second sort of men have 
spiritual power. And the final test and witness 
of spiritual force is seen in the ability to cast the 
bodily life away and yet continue to give help 
and courage and wisdom to those who see us 
no longer; to be, like Christ, the helper of 
men's souls even from beyond the grave. 

VII. 14, 15. 



JUNE 10. 161 

Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy pres- 
ence from the strife of tongues. — Ps. xxi. 20. 

WE believe in Jesus and try to live with 
Him. How is it that a flippant toss of 
skeptical smartness about Him, or a sneer at 
our foil)' in making Him our Master, lays hold 
of and stings us so, sends us home anxious, 
puzzled, and worried ? We are not wholly 
hidden from the strife of tongues. It must 
be that we are not completely in the secret of 
His presence. We are not there constantly 
enough. There are moments, times when we 
are praying, times when in sorrow His sympa- 
thy is like life to us, when there is not the 
tongue so rude and bitter that it could ruffle 
the rest of our souls in Him; times when 
nothing that man could say would frighten or 
depress us. At such times we learn what it 
is to be thoroughly with Him, and understand 
what a guarded and safe life it must be to be 
hidden there always. 

I. 83. 



Wisest of spirits that spirit which dwelleth 
apart 
Hid in the presence of God for a chapel and 
nest, 
Sending a wish and a will and a passionate 
heart 
Over the eddy of life to that Presence in 

rest: 
Seated alone and in peace till God bids it 
arise. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



162 JUNE ii. 



And they sent forth Barnabas, . . . Who, 
when he came^ . . . exhorted them all, that with 
purpose of heart they should cleave unto the Lord. 

Acts xi. 22, 23. 

WHEN a man gathers up his life and goes 
out simply to spend it all in telling the 
children of God who never heard it from any 
other lips than his that their Father is their 
Father; when all that he has known of Christ 
is simply turned into so much force by which 
the tidings of their sonship is to be driven 
home to hearts that do not easily receive so 
vast a truth; to that man certainly the idea 
has become a master and a king, as it has not 
to us. Belief is power. By the quantity of 
power I may know the quantity of belief. He 
is the true idealist, not who possesses ideas, 
but whom ideas possess; not the man whose 
life wears its ideas as ornamental jewels, but 
the man whose ideas shape his life like plastic 
clay. And so the true Christian idealist is he 
whose conception of man as the redeemed 
child of God has taken all his life and moulded 
it in new shapes, planted it in new places, so 
filled and inspired it that, like the Spirit of 
God in Elijah, it has taken it up and carried it 
where it never would have chosen to go of its 
own lower will. II. 176. 

Should He need a goodly tree 
For the healing of the nations, 

He will make it grow; if not, 

Never yet His love forgot 

Human love and faith and patience. 
Dinah Muloch Craik. 



JUNE 12. 163 

Serving the Lord with all humility. 

Acts xx. 19. 

T T OW very rare it is to find an exceedingly 
* ^ useful and hard-working man whose en- 
ergy and devotion are not tainted by self-sat- 
isfaction! But here, if all we do is but to 
make ourselves channels through which the 
power of God shall flow; if when a man stands 
up and calls a whole city out of corruptness, 
or a whole race out of slavery, he is deeply 
and genuinely conscious that it is not he that 
speaks, but God (as Jesus, you remember, told 
His disciples it should be with them), then 
that is won which is so rare in the great work- 
ers (or in little ones either): all self-satisfac- 
tion disappears. The man is lost in the cause; 
nay, the cause itself is lost in joy that God, 
whom to know is life, has made Himself 
hereby a little more known to men. 

VII. 49- 

Lord, give me light to do Thy work; 

For only, Lord, from Thee 
Can come the light by which these eyes 

The way of work can see 

The work is Thine, not mine, O Lord, 

It is Thy race we run; 
Give light! and then shall all I do 

Be well and truly done. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



164 JUNE 13. 

Awful in unity, 
O God, we worship Thee, 
More simply One, because supremely Three! 

Faber. 

WHEN we preach the Fatherhood of God 
we preach His divinity; when we point 
to Christ the perfect Saviour, it is a Divine 
Redeemer that we declare; and when we plead 
with men to hear the voice and yield to the 
persuasions of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter 
into whose comfort we invite them is Divine. 
The divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, 
this is our Gospel. By this Gospel we look 
for salvation. It is a Gospel to be used, to be 
believed in, and to be lived by; not merely to 
be kept and admired and discussed and ex- 
plained. 

I. 228. 

If a man does believe the doctrine of the 
Trinity, he ought to rejoice and glory in his 
faith as the enrichment of his life. Not as 
a burden on his back, but as wings on his 
shoulders, he ought to carry his belief. To 
cease to believe it would be, not welcome lib- 
erty, but incalculable loss. For a new soul to 
come to believe it is not, as men have often 
foolishly talked, the putting out into a sea all 
dark with mists and fogs. It is the entrance 
into a luxuriant land where all life lives at 
its fullest, where nature opens her most lavish 
bounty, and where man has the consummate 
opportunity to be and do his best. 

VII. 334- 



JUNE 14. 165 

NOTHING could be more misleading than 
... to talk about the doctrine of the 
Trinity as if it claimed to be the solution, the 
dissipation, of the mystery of God. I say 
"God" to the heathen who has gone so far 
as to believe that there is one God and not 
many gods in the universe; and he gazes into 
the darkness of the great idea and says: " I 
do not know what God is. A million questions 
come buffeting me like bats out of the darkness 
the moment that I dare even to turn my face 
that way. Let me hear His commandments 
and go and do them. For Himself I dare not 
even ask what He is. ' ' That is the mystery of 
darkness. . . . Then I say "God" to the 
Christian and he looks up and says: "Yes, I 
know; Father, Son, and Spirit; my Father, 
my Brother, my inspiring Friend. I know 
Him, what He is, for Fie has shown Himself 
to me." But with each word, Father, Brother, 
Friend, there come flocking new questions, not 
like bats out of the darkness, but like sun- 
beams out of the light, bewildering the be- 
lieving soul with guesses and insoluble sugges- 
tions and intangible visions of the love, the 
truth, the glory of God, which were impossi- 
ble until this clothing by God of Himself with 
radiance in Christ had come. That is the 
mystery of light. 

II. 312. 

O Blessed Trinity! 
In the deep darkness of prayer's stillest night 
We worship Thee blinded with light! 

Faber. 



i66 JUNE 15. 



Who coverest Thyself with light as with a gar- 
ment. — Ps. civ. 2. 

WITH all deep things the deeper light 
brings new mysteriousness. The mys- 
tery of light is the privilege and prerogative 
of the profoundest things. The shallow things 
are capable only of the mystery of darkness. 
Of that all things are capable. Nothing is so 
thin, so light, so small, that if you cover it 
with clouds and hide it in half-lights it will not 
seem mysterious. But the most genuine and 
profound things you may bring forth into the 
fullest light, and let the sunshine bathe them 
through and through, and in them there will 
open ever new wonders of mysteriousness. The 
mystery of light belongs to them. And how 
then must it be with God, the Being of all 
beings, the Being who is Himself essential 
Being, out of whom all other beings spring and 
from whom they are continually fed ? Surely 
in Him the law which we have been tracing 
must find its consummation. Surely of Him 
it must be supremely true that the more we 
know of Him, the more He shows Himself to 
us, the more mysterious He must forever be. 
The mystery of light must be complete in Him. 

II. 309. 

The subtlest and profoundest of men can- 
not explain mysteries; the simplest person 
can appropriate and exult in them. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



JUNE 16. 167 

And the four and twenty elders fall down before 
him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that 
liveih for ever and ever, and cast their crowns be- 
fore the throne. — Rev. iv. 10. 

ONLY those who have crowns to cast can 
do true homage before His throne. . . . 
Only those who are kingly themselves can 
properly honor the kingliest. . . . Men are 
measured by their reverences. All human life 
is like the annual procession of the Jews, 
marching up to Jerusalem, to the Holy City. 
The nearer we are to that place of supreme 
adoration, the nearer the purpose of our life 
is -fulfilled. What do you adore, what do you 
really reverence and respect ? is the real test 
question of your life. In an age which makes 
too little of reverence, let us not dare to let 
drop the truth that only that which is high can 
worship the highest, and so covet as the best 
crown of our existence the power so to know 
and feel that we can genuinely worship God. 

VI. 38, 44, 45. 

It is life 
From self-enfranchised, opening every vein 
To let in glory from above, and give 
What we receive in fragrance, color, fruit, — 
Life, which is Heaven's: ourselves dead mat- 
ter, else. 

Lucy Larcom. 



168 JUNE 17. 

SO long as a man is living for himself and 
honoring himself, there is an association, 
however remote it may be, with all the lowest 
forms of selfishness in which men have lived; 
but the moment a man begins to live in genu- 
ine adoration of the absolute good, and wor- 
ship God, he parts company from all these 
lower orders of human life. . . . When you 
say to God, " O God, take me, for the high- 
est thing that I can do with myself is to give 
myself to Thee,". . . you sweep into the cur- 
rent of the best, the holiest, and the most 
richly human of our humanity, which in every 
age has dedicated itself to God. The worship- 
pers of all the world — the Jew, the Greek, the 
Hindu, the Christian in all his various cultures, 
take you for their brother. . . . You are never 
in such company as when you are before God's 
throne offering Him your brightest and most 
precious. VI. 44, 45. 

Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly 
Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for 

know 
God hath a select family of sons 
Now scattered wide through earth, . . . 
Who are thy spiritual kindred. 
And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on 

the day 
To seal the marriage of these minds with 

thine. 
... Ye shall be 
The salt of all the elements, world of the 

world. 

Emerson. 



JUNE 18. 169 

r\I7'HEN] ground is trodden hard, it is the 
L VV very substance of the ground that lies 
impenetrable and catches the seed, and will 
not let it in and claim the soil and do its fruit- 
ful work. . . . This is the notion of the Crust. 
It is not a foreign material;* but the thing 
itself, grown hard and rigid, shuts the soft and 
tender and receptive portions of the thing 
away. . . . Thus out of the very substance 
of a man's life, out of the very stuff of what 
he is and does, comes the hindrance which 
binds itself about his being, and will not let 
the better influences out. . . . That self-made 
barrier must be broken up, must be restored 
to its first condition and become again part of 
the substance out of which it was evolved, be- 
fore the life can be fed with the dew of first 
principles and the rain of the immediate de- 
scent of God. 

What is the crust upon your life that keeps 
out holy influences ? 

VI. 155, 156. 



This crust of selfishness and sin 
That shuts my better self within, — 
If Thou canst make it soft and fine, 
So bloom and fruitage there may shine 
In answer to Thy dew and sun, 
I can but say: Thy will be done! 
For where the deepest cuts Thy plough, 
And all is bare and broken now, 
Faith sees the tender grain-rows spring, 
The teeming valleys laugh and sing! 

J. L. M. W. 



170 JUNE 19. 

IF, as we profess to believe, all right is for- 
ever antagonistic to all wrong, then what 
a lesson there is to us in the steadfast law and 
faithfulness of all the universe around us. 
How each day coming to its task of crowding 
labors, each night bringing in its blessed peace 
of sleep in obedience to the old command of 
Genesis, brings with it a remonstrance against 
our faint-heartedness and constant wavering 
of loyalty and truth. The stars in their courses 
fight against us as they fought against Sisera. 
The duty that they are doing cries shame on 
the duty that we are leaving undone every 
day. . . . While this morning's sunrise is rosy 
with the memory of last night's sunset, while 
noon looks longingly down the eastern sky 
that it has travelled, and fondly onward to the 
night toward which it hurries, while month 
links in with month, and season works with 
season, and year joins hand with year in the 
long labor of the world's hard life, there is a 
lesson for us all to learn of the unity and the 
harmony of our existence. Let us take the 
lesson, and with it in our hearts go out to be 
more tolerant, more kindly, and more true in 
our dealings with our fellow-men. ... It is 
sympathy, it is love, it is healthy interest in 
one another, that all these great teachers make 
their lesson. 

X. 243. 

So links more subtle and more fine 
Bind every other soul to thine 
In one great Brotherhood divine. 

Adelaide A. Procter. 



JUNE 20. 171 

The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of 
the world. — 1 John iv. 14. 

AND when an earnest soul accepts this ever- 
lasting Christ, is there not a new glory 
in his salvation when he thinks that it has been 
from everlasting? He looks back, and lo, the 
Saviour was his Saviour before the worlds 
were made! The covenant to which he clings 
had its sublime conditions written in the very 
constitution of the Godhead. It was not 
spoken first on Calvary; nay, it did not begin 
when it was told to David, or to Moses, or to 
poor Adam crushed into the dust with his new 
sinfulness outside the garden-gate. Before 
them all, in the very nature of the Deity, was 
written the prophecy that if ever in the un- 
folding of the ages one poor human soul like 
mine should need salvation, the eternal Christ, 
bringing His credential of Eternal Human 
Brotherhood, should come to save it. The ages 
rolled along; my soul was born, and sinned; 
it cried out to be saved, and lo, Christ came! 
What is there left for me to do but cling to 
Him with a love strong as His precious prom- 
ises and a faith firm as His Everlasting Sav- 
iourship ? 

VI. 319. 

Except the Cross, and Him who died 
Upon it, now in earth or heaven 
What own I, claim I ? Now below 
I seek no farther; here is woe 
Assuaged forever: now above 
I look no longer; here is love! 

Dora Green well. 



172 JUNE 21. 



He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit 
reap everlasting life. — Gal. vi. 8. 

CHRIST had His word of encouragement 
and strength to say to every soldier in 
His army and to every worker at His work. 
. . . Not merely scholars in their studies, not 
merely missionaries in their martyrdoms, not 
merely saints in their closed closets, but every 
working man and woman everywhere, — they 
are all His. The spirit which proceeds from 
Him may pour through the whole mass and 
find out every particle, and give to each an 
impetus towards its own next higher stage of 
life, and so bear the whole along together to- 
wards the completion of each man and the 
completion of the whole social and business 
life, and politics and education, and then, as 
the crown of them all, Religion. "That is 
not first which is Spiritual, but that which is 
Natural; and afterward that which is Spirit- 
ual! " But they are all God's; and to make 
each instinct with what measure of His life it 
is capable of containing — that is to build them 
all into a flight of shining stairs, sweeping 
upward into even clearer and intenser light, 
until he who mounts to the full summit stands 
by the altar of God's unclouded presence and 
realizes the blessedness of perfect Communion 
with Him. 

VI. 258. 



For we are laborers together with God. 

1 Cor. iii. 9. 



JUNE 22. 173 

Life is too short to waste 
In critic peep or cynic bark, 

Quarrel or reprimand, — 
'Twill soon be dark: 

Up! mind thine own aim, and 

God speed the mark! Emerson. 

MEN complain that God does not do this 
and that and the other thing for them, 
which He never undertook to do. They say, 
"He does not make me rich. He does not 
fill my life with friendships." So they flutter 
about with their complainings as a bird will 
sweep this way and that, doubtful and wan- 
dering and tempted on every side. But as at 
last the bird catches sight of the home where 
it belongs, though very far away, and all its 
flutterings cease, and setting itself straight 
towards that, it steadies itself and seeks it 
without a single turn aside; so by and by one 
of these wanderers among many hopes discov- 
ers far away the hope, the one only hope, for 
which God made him, and forgetting every- 
thing else thenceforth gives himself to that, 
to serve God and by serving Him to grow into 
His goodness. I. 312. 

I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way; I 

shall arrive! What time, what circuit, 
I ask not; but . . . 
In some good time — His good time — I shall 

arrive: 
He guides me and the bird. In His good 

time! Browning. 



i 7 4 JUNE 23. 

A central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation. Wordsworth. 

BUT motion without fatigue, or waste, or 
need of refreshment or repair, that is 
the finished idea of Peace. We talk about the 
" Peace of God." Is not this really the con- 
ception which, carried to its highest, reaches 
that sublime idea ? " My father worketh hith- 
erto and I work," said Jesus. It is no Orien- 
tal apathy. The Christian thought of God is 
full of interest, zeal, emotion, action, only it 
is alwa3^s perfectly balanced with its surround- 
ings, since its surroundings are the utterance 
and creation of itself. God and the universe 
in their unbroken harmony. The universe 
never asking anything of God which God can- 
not do. God having no power or affection 
which the universe cannot utter. That is the 
Perfect Peace. To match that consummate 
Peace in our lower little sphere, to be to our 
world as God is to His, to work as perpetually 
and yet as calmly and so effectively as He 
works; that is the real thing that we pray for 
when we ask for one another the Peace of 
God. VI. 189. 

Roll round, strange years; swift seasons, come 
and go; 
Ye leave upon us but an outward sign; 
Ye cannot touch the inward and divine, 
Which God alone does know; 
There, sealed till summers, winters, all shall 

cease, 
In His deep peace. Dinah Muloch Craik. 



JUNE 24. 175 

He was not that Light, but was sent to bear wit- 
ness of that Light. — John i. 8. 

TO look different from other people, to wear 
other clothes, to be somehow eccentric, 
. . . this is the most superficial form of the 
desire for originality. . . . To start some new 
idea, to send forth something that shall show 
our fellows that this machinery within us does 
not work just the same with all the mental 
machinery in all the world — this is the higher 
ambition of a higher man. Different from 
both of them is that religious consciousness 
which the devout man has that God made him 
for a special purpose, for a special exhibition 
of himself; and so the desire to be himself 
completely, in order that no purpose which 
God had in his creation may fail through his 
being distorted or obscured. This is a desire 
for the divine originality of character which God 
intended. . . . Many men try to be John 
the Baptists by wearing the skins and eating 
the locusts and wild honey. Others would be 
John the Baptists by preaching strange doc- 
trines. Very few seek to live the life that he 
lived by recognizing that they are sent into the 
world, not to shine themselves, but merely by 
some way of their own to bear witness of the 
Light of God. VII. 41. 

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst make Thy forerunner, 
Saint John Baptist, to be as a bright light in Thy temple ; 
Grant that we may ever shine in Thy Church, with the 
ardor of faith, in works of charity, and in true humility ; 
through Thy mercy, O Christ our God, Who, with the 
Father and the Holy Ghost, livest and reignest, ever one 
God, world without end. Amen. — Ancient Collects. 



176 JUNE 25. 

THERE are two persons to whom life is 
pretty clear, the man who does not think 
or feel at all, and the man who thinks and feels 
very deeply. . . . The sluggish creature who 
just runs his little fragment of the universe 
and asks no questions further is troubled by 
no doubts. The finished soul who sees with 
God's eyes the great moral laws which govern 
all God's worlds, he, too, may rest in peace. 
Between the two the great mass of men, see- 
ing the difficulties, but not seeing their solu- 
tions, live in disquietude and questionings. 
And when one has once outgrown the first 
repose of ignorance and thoughtlessness, he 
never can go back to it — there is no hope for 
him except to go on to the higher repose of 
faith and knowledge and sympathy with God. 

VI. 112. 

Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the 
ineffable Name ? 
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not 
made with hands! 
What, have fear of Thee who art ever the 
same ? 
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that 
Thy power expands ? 
There shall never be one lost good! What 
was, shall live as before, 
The evil is null, is nought, is silence imply- 
ing sound: 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, 

so much good more; 
On the earth, the broken arcs; in the heaven, 
the perfect round. 

Browning. 



JUNE 26. 177 

A man should rejoice in his own works ; for that 
is his portion. — Eccles. iii. 22. 

IT is the mere smatterer in any profession 
who thinks it is slight and is contemptuous 
about it. It is a universal rule that he is a 
poor workman who does not honor and respect 
his work. A man has no right to be doing 
any work which, as he grows greater within it, 
does not offer him new views of itself to call 
out an ever-increasing reverence and honor. 
And in all the good occupations of life (one 
would like to impress it upon every young 
merchant, young mechanic, and young student 
whom he can speak to) a man's best proof of 
growing greatness in himself is a growing per- 
ception of the greatness and beauty of his 

work. 

VI. 40. 

And everywhere, here and always, 

If we would but open our eyes, 
We should find, through these beaten foot- 
paths, 

Our way into Paradise. 

Dull earth would be dull no longer, 

The clod would sparkle a gem; 
And our hands, at their commonest labor, 

Would be building Jerusalem. 

Lucy Larcom. 



178 JUNE 27. 

Hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the 
Spirit which He hath given us. — 1 John iii. 24. 

The branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it 
abide in the Vine. — John xv. 4. 

IN this truth of the believer's abiding in 
Christ, there are two notions involved — of 
Permanence and of Repose. . . . There is a 
new tranquillity which is not stagnation, but 
assurance, when a life thus enters into Christ. 
It is like the hushing of a million babbling, 
chattering mountain streams as they approach 
the sea and fill themselves with its deep pur- 
poses. It is like the steadying of a lost bird's 
quivering wings when it at last sees the nest 
and quiets itself with the certainty of reaching 
it, and settles smoothly down on level pinions 
to sweep unswervingly towards it. It is like 
these to see the calm of a restless soul that 
discovers Christ and rests its tired wings upon 
the atmosphere of His truth, and so abides in 
Him as it goes on towards Him. 

VI. 299, 300. 



O my soul, how noble thou art, 

What a wonderful power lies hid in thee! 

For thou canst not rest until thou attain the 

highest good, 
And find out the ultimate end; 
Which being recognized and found, 
Thy restlessness shall cease. 

Thomas a Kempis. 






JUNE 28. 179 

We know that we have passed from death imto 
life becaicse we love the brethren. — 1 John iii. 14. 

THAT man ought to distrust his Christianity 
very deeply who finds that when he has 
become a Christian he takes no more large 
and hopeful and charitable view of his fellow- 
men and their lives than he did before. The 
glory of a revealed immortality is that it ex- 
alts into struggle for a purpose that which 
seemed to be only the restless tossing and 
heaving of mere discontent . . . poor fitful 
efforts after goodness, broken and distracted; 
a mere unrest and moral turmoil everywhere. 
What can interpret it except the great opening 
of an eternity, and the sight of the power of 
that eternity working even here ? With that 
in view, we come to a large and tolerant sus- 
pense of judgment that is good for us. Who 
can say how much of this which seems pur- 
poseless restlessness is really purposeful strug- 
gle ? The wild, confused waves are going 
somewhere. We grow to a sure conviction 
that very much of what seems bad is only good 
unformed and struggling under the power of 
the resurrection to its full development and 
exhibition. 

VII. 281, 2S2. 

Only add 
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith, 
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love, 
By name to come called charity, the soul 
Of all the rest: then wilt thou . . . possess 
A Paradise within thee. 

MlLTOX. 



180 JUNE 29. 

SIMON called Peter left his net and followed 
Jesus. He went out of the old life into 
the untried new life, following this Master. He 
went out to a friendship and a work that were 
to fill his days with delight and inspiration. 
He went to new thoughts, new hopes, new 
duties. But did he go to nothing else ? As 
he turns and follows Jesus does he not go bur- 
dened with new dangers which he did not have 
before ? . . . If from that moment of his 
choice it is possible for him to acknowledge 
Christ, is it not possible also to deny Him ? 

Does not such a truth as this, when it is un- 
derstood and deeply felt, make men reject the 
privileges which bring such dangers with 
them ? Happily it is not so . . . commonly 
the scale of men's construction is loftier than 
that. Commonly the man who is man enough 
to see this truth is man enough to meet it. It 
fills him with a soberness which is energy and 
not despair. And besides, men see that it is 
a danger which they cannot shirk. To avoid 
privilege in order to escape the chance of sin 
which it brings with it is essentially to commit 
the very sin of which we are afraid. For 
Peter to refuse to follow Jesus because he sees 
the denial looming in the distance is really 
only to anticipate his sin and to deny his Mas- 
ter now, 

VII. 114, 115. 



Fear ballasts hope, hope buoys up fear, 
And both befit us here. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



JUNE 30. 181 

Yea, Lord, Thou know est that I love Thee. 

John xxi. 15. 

THE true sign of forgiveness is not some 
mysterious signal waved from the sky; 
not some obscure emotion hunted out in your 
heart; not some stray text culled out of your 
Bible; certainly not some word of mortal 
priest telling you that your satisfaction is com- 
plete. The soul full of responsive love to 
Christ, and ready, longing, hungry to serve 
Him, is its own sign of forgiveness. ... I 
think that with all we know of the divine heart 
of Jesus He would far rather see a soul trust 
Him too much, if that is possible, than trust 
Him too little, which we know is possible 
enough. When a man who has sinned, and 
who, like Simon Peter, has not a shadow or a 
ghost of an excuse to offer for his sin, has so 
known Christ that he never thinks of Him as 
one to be propitiated, never doubts for an 
instant that if he is forgivable he is forgiven, 
and so lets his hatred of his old sin break out 
in an utterance of his love for the Holy One, 
and lets his sorrow for his treason only show 
itself in his desire for loyal work, then that 
poor sinner's sin is dead and gone. 

VII. 127. 



Turn all to love, poor soul; 

Be love thy watch and ward; 
Be love thy starting-point, thy goal, 

And thy reward. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



182 JULY i. 

Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us ; for 
it hath heard all the words of the Lord. 

Josh. xxiv. 27. 

THERE are always people who are to the 
world they live in what that stone in 
Shechem was to the nation in the midst of which 
it stood. Not voluble people, not people with 
their glib and ready judgment upon every- 
thing which goes on about them, perhaps 
people who have seemed to the world at large 
mere stones; but people who some time in 
their lives had had the primary truth of God, 
the Divinity of Righteousness, spoken so into 
their ears that it has filled their being. Thence- 
forward they spoke that word in all its simpli- 
city to everybody. All earnest struggle after 
righteousness feels their approval and sympa- 
thy, and counts it really God's. All shuffling, 
cowardly and wanton sin hides or hurries 
away from their rebuking presence. They 
declare no subtleties and no refinements. They 
simply, broadly utter right and wrong. Such 
people have a noble place and function in the 
world. Men who would not own God's judg- 
ments directly, own God's judgments as they 
come through them. They purify and bless 
the circle, the community in which they live, 
as that stone under the oak at Shechem must 
have seemed to purify and bless the whole 
land of Israel. VI. 263. 

Through such souls ... 
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light 
For us i' the dark to rise by. 

Browning. 



JULY 2. 183 

Unto one he gave five talents, to another two, 
and to another one ; to every man according to his 
several ability. — Matt. xxv. 15. 

IN the life which that parable describes, the 
different talents of different servants are 
fully taken into the account. Duty is measured 
by chance, and yet the essential idea of duty 
is never weakened. I am bound to do less 
than you, but I am just as severely bound to 
do my little as you are to do your much. 
Where else could those ideas be kept in perfect 
harmony and peace, neither of them hurting 
the other, but within the larger idea of father- 
hood ? In what group could the child take his 
little task, fitted to his little hands, and do it, 
with the entire conviction that he must do it, 
and, nevertheless, not vexed nor bewildered by 
the sight of tasks a thousand times greater 
than his own being done close by his side; and 
at the same time, the great man, the hero, dedi- 
cate himself to his vast work with no sense of 
oppression nor injustice, nor with any feeling 
of superiority or pride, — in what group could 
these two faithful souls work on, in such differ- 
ence and yet in such identity, but in a family, 
where every child has his own special duty, 
great or small, clothed with the absoluteness 
of the Fatherhood which is over all ? 

VIII. 63. 

For what is infinite must be a home, 

A shelter for the meanest life, 
Where it is free to reach its greatest growth, 

Far from the touch of strife. 

Faber. 



i8 4 JULY 3. 

THE more we read the Psalms, and indeed 
* all the Bible, we are impressed with the 
remarkable value which belongs to the Holy 
Land as representing not merely the localities 
of certain historical events, but also by a higher 
association the geography of the spiritual life 
of man. . . . Though the historic land which 
lies between the Mediterranean sea and the Asi- 
atic deserts should be blotted from the surface 
of the earth to-morrow, there would be eter- 
nally a Holy Land. Still all over the world, 
the Jordan would roll down its rocky bed to 
the Dead sea; still the hills would stand about 
Jerusalem ; still the desert would open between 
Judea and Galilee; still Egypt must mean 
captivity, and the Red sea deliverance, and 
the Gilgal providence, and Bethany domestic 
piety, and Calvary redeeming love, — although 
the visible places to which those names belong 
should cease to be forever. We little know 
how much we owe to this eternal picture 
drawn in the hearts of men, this mapped-out 

Palestine of the inner life. 

VI. 18. 

For all of good the past hath had 
Remains to make our own time glad — 
Our common daily life divine, 
And every land a Palestine. 

Whittier. 



JULY 4. 185 

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave! 
Peace and order and beauty draw 
Round thy symbol of Light and Law! 

Whittier. 

TESUS was a patriot. That sentiment which 
^ makes so much of the poetry of the earth 
— the love of men for their native land — was 
very strong in His bosom. . . . But why is 
it that His patriotism is a part of His life to 
which we least often turn ? It is not only that 
He lived a larger life and did a larger work, 
which has far outreached the Jewish people 
and touched us with its influence. It is the 
constant predominance of the sonship to God 
over the sonship to David in His conscious- 
ness, making Him always eager for the land 
of David because of the interests of God 
which it enshrined. This is a distinct and 
definite quality when it appears in a man's 
patriotism. It makes his patriotism fine and 
lofty above the measure of the common patri- 
otic feeling of mankind. 

VIII. 131, 132. 

Our country hath a gospel of her own 
To preach and practise before all the world, — 
The freedom and divinity of man, 
The glorious claims of human brother- 
hood, . . . 
And the soul's fealty to none but God. 

James Russell Lowell. 



186 JULY s. 

And be clothed with humility. — i Pet. v. 5. 

IT is striking that almost without exception 
the word humility, used before the time of 
Christ, is used contemptuously and rebuk- 
ingly. It always meant meanness of spirit. 
To be humble was to be a coward. It 
described a cringing soul. It was a word of 
slaves. Such is its almost constant classic use. 
Where could we find a more striking instance 
of the change that the Christian religion 
brought into the world, than in the way in 
which it took this disgraceful word and made 
it honorable ? To be humble is to have a low 
estimation of one's self. That was considered 
shameful in the olden time. Nobody claimed 
it for himself. Nobody enjoined it upon 
another. You insulted a man if you called 
him humble. It seemed to be inconsistent 
with that self-respect which is necessary to 
any good activity. Christ came and made the 
despised quality the crowning grace of the 
culture that He inaugurated. Lo! the dis- 
graceful word became the key-word of His 
fullest gospel. He redeemed the quality, and 
straightway the name became honorable. It 
became the ambition of all men to wear it. 
To call a man humble was to praise him now. 
Men affected it if they did not have it. Pride 
began to ape humility when humility was 
made the crowning grace of human life. 

I. 325. 

Christ was pleased Himself to be 

Our Pattern of humility : 

To show no path of duty lies 

Too low for highest dignities. J. L. M. W. 



JULY 6. 187 

TESUS was never guarding himself, but 
^ always invading the lives of others with 
His holiness. . . . His life was like an open 
stream that keeps the sea from flowing up into 
it by the eager force with which it flows down 
into the sea. He was so anxious that the 
world should be saved, that therein was His 
salvation from the world. He labored so to 
make the world pure that He never even had 
to try to be pure Himself. Health issued 
from Him so to the sick who touched His 
garments that He was in no danger of their 
infection coming in to Him. This was the 
positiveness of His sinlessness. He did not 
spend His life in trying not to do wrong. He 
was too full of the earnest love and longing to 
do right, — to do His Father's will. 

So we are sure at once, and we learn it cer- 
tainly from Christ, that the true spotlessness 
from the world must come, not negatively, by 
the garments being drawn back from every 
worldly contact, but positively, by the gar- 
ments being so essentially, divinely pure that 
they fling pollution off, as sunshine, hurrying 
on its mission to the world, flings back the 

darkness that tries to stop its way. 

I. 182, 184. 

Have Jesus in thy heart, 

And thou wilt be preserved from all defilement. 

Thomas a Kempis. 



JULY 7. 



Be ye glad and rejoice forever in that which I 
create. — Is. lxv. 18. 

IT means something that, in the disorder of 
thought and feeling, so many men are flee- 
ing to the study of orderly nature. And it is 
rest and comfort. Whatever men are feeling, 
the seasons come and go. Whatever men are 
doubting, the rock is firm under their feet, and 
the steadfast stars pass in their certain courses 
overhead. Men who dare count on nothing 
else may still count on the tree's blossoming 
and the grape coloring. It is good for a man 
perplexed and lost among many thoughts to 
come into closer intercourse with Nature, and 
to learn her ways and to catch her spirit. It is 
no fancy to believe that if the children of this 
generation are taught a great deal more than 
we used to be taught of nature, and the ways 
of God in nature, they will be provided with 
the material for far healthier, happier, and less 
perplexed and anxious lives than most of us 
are living. 

I. 171. 

Nature . . . can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb 
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. 

Wordsworth. 



JULY 8. 189 



I SEEM to hear a certain sort of apologetic 
tone among men of faith, which is not 
good. . . . The man who trusts God some- 
times seems almost to say to his unbelieving 
brother, " Forgive me. I am not as strong as 
you are. I cannot do without this help. You 
are more strong and do not need it. But let 
me keep it still." No open foe of faith can 
do faith so much harm as that kind of be- 
liever. ... It is a sick man apologizing to 
death because he is not quite ready yet to die. 
It is the meagreness of health in him that 
prompts his poor apology. Let him grow 
healthier and he begins to look not down to 
death with apologies, but up to life with hopes 
and aspirations. So let the weak disciple grow 
more strong in faith, and he will have no longer 
feebje words of shame and self-excuse to say 
about his trust in Christ; only his whole life 
will grow one earnest prayer for an increase of 
faith, as the child's life is one continued hope 

and prayer for manhood. 

VI. 100. 

Belief's fire, once in us, 
Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself: 
We penetrate our life with such a glow 
As fire lends to wood and iron. 

Browning. 



i 9 o JULY 9. 



If any man thinketh he is wise, . . . let him 
become a fool, that he may be wise. 

1 Cor. iii. 18. 

BEHOLD, wisdom is the end of all! No 
less in the Bible and in the Church than 
in the schools. ... If the Gospel discredits 
any of man's achievements, declaring them to 
be incompetent to satisfy the soul and educate 
the nature, it is always only that it may insist 
upon a higher knowledge. Christ was a 
teacher. Christ is a teacher forever. If He 
declares that no scholastic culture, and no skill 
in the arts of life, and no acquaintance with 
the ways of men can save a soul, it is only 
that He may insist that man must know his 
own soul, and the deep difference of right and 
wrong, and the infinite holiness of God. These 
are true knowledges. " That they might know 
Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ 
whom Thou hast sent." It is of all impor- 
tance that we should know that the Christian 
life is a life of knowledge, not of ignorance. 
It is a separate, a higher region of knowledge 
than that to which we generally give the 
name; but it is knowledge still. It is the 
apprehension of truths, of those vast truths 
which the senses cannot discover, nor the 
intellect evolve, but which through the open 
avenues of the spirit enter in and occupy the 
life. VI. 167. 

Have I knowledge ? confounded it shrinks at 

wisdom laid bare! 
Have I forethought ? how purblind, how blank 
to the Infinite Care! Browning. 



JULY 10. 191 

IT is the law of God, that wherever there is 
duty there is also possible joy. Just as 
the man who sees foliage knows that some- 
where there must be water, although his eyes 
or ears cannot discern it, and the trees seem 
to grow out of the sand; so the man who is 
sure that in any spot there is duty for him to 
do knows that there is a happiness for him 
somewhere in the doing of that duty, even 
though for the present it seems to be a dread- 
ful drudgery. In the expectation of that joy 
he works. The expectation of joyzs joy; and 
so the man who in his voluntariness surrenders 
some delight or privilege, finds that there is a 
subtler mastery of happiness which is to be 
gained only by giving it up and seeking some- 
thing higher, though for the time it seems to 
separate us from the happiness we love. Many 
and many an experience there is in this world 
which gives us the right to believe that happi- 
ness is something very coy and wilful, which, 
when we chase it, runs away from us; but, 
when we turn away from it and seek for some- 
thing better, and forget to seek it, changes its 
mind and chases us. 

III. 238. 



He was not all unhappy. His resolve 
Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore 
Prayer from a living source within the will, 
And beating up through all the bitter world, 
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, 
Kept him a living soul. 

Tennyson. 



192 JULY ii. 

With w hat measure ye mete, it shall be measured 
to you again. — Matt. vii. 2. 

IT is a law of vast extent and wonderful 
exactness. The world is far more orderly 
than we believe; a deeper and a truer justice 
runs through it than we imagine. We all go 
about calling ourselves victims, discoursing on 
the cruel world, and wondering that it should 
treat us so, when really we are only meeting 
the rebound of our own lives. What we have 
been to things about us has made it necessary 
that they should be this to us. As we have 
given ourselves to them, so they have given 
themselves to us. . . . Only, keep your minds 
clear of any materialism which would think 
that in mere earth itself resides this power of 
just and discriminating reply. It is as we and 
all things exist together in the great embrac- 
ing and pervading element of God that all 
things give themselves to us as we give our- 
selves to them. So all the phenomena of life 
are at the same time divine judgments if we 
are only wise enough to read them. 

III. 268. 



Vainly the lonely tarn its cup 

Holds to the feeding skies; 
Unless the source be lifted up, 

The streamlet cannot rise: 
By law inexorably blent, 
Each is the other's measurement. 

Susan Coolidge. 



JULY 12. 193 



IN some strange shrine of Romish or Pagan 
religion, all glorious with art, all blazing 
with the light of precious stones, there bend 
around the altar the true devotees who believe 
with all their souls; while at the door. . . . 
lingers a group of travellers full of joy at the 
wondrous beauty of the place; and as when 
the music ceases and the lights go out they go 
away, each carrying what it was in him to 
receive, — the devotee his spiritual peace, the 
artistic tourist his aesthetic joy: so men bestow 
themselves on Christ, and by the selves that 
they bestow on Him the giving of Himself to 
them must of necessity be measured. . . . 
Not merely with outstretched hands but with 
open hearts we must stand before Him. . . . 
Then to each of us even here upon the earth 
shall begin that which is to be the everlasting 
wonder and delight of heaven, the perfect giv- 
ing of the Lord to souls that are perfectly 
given to Him, the everlasting action and reac- 
tion, the unhindered beating back and forth of 
need and grace between the Saviour on His 
throne and His servants at their tireless work 
for Him. 

III. 286. 

What Thou hast given, do Thou receive the 

same; 
And whence the rivers rise, thither let them 

return. 

Thomas a Kempis. 



13 



i 9 4 JULY 13. 

Lord, is it I ? — Matt. xxvi. 22. 

NO sin is sudden. The warning may be only- 
half recognized, but when the sin of our 
life comes, who of us has not felt, strangely 
mingled with its strangeness, a certain dread- 
ful familiarity, such as one might feel when a 
man whom he had never seen, but of whom he 
dreamed last night, and whose face he remem- 
bered from the dream, stepped in the living 
flesh across his threshold ? . . . The man in 
business, spurning the very thought of cheat- 
ing, as ready as he ever was to strike down 
any man who dared approach him with temp- 
tation, finds himself some day questioning duty 
and trying to make it say that it is not duty, 
or seeing how close he can run under the lee 
of a doubtful transaction and yet sail out safe. 
He has not sinned, but if he is a sensitive and 
thoughtful man he sees, as he opens his eyes 
to what he is doing, how he might sin. He 
shudders as a man might who, walking in his 
sleep, woke up and found that what he thought 
was music is the roaring in his ears of the 
chasm on whose brink he stands. His coming 
sin has given him its warning. 

VII. 119, 120. 



Out of my soul's depths to Thee my cries have 

sounded; 
Lord, shouldst Thou weigh our faults, who's 

not confounded ? 

Campion. 



JULY 14. 195 

OUR best moments are the utterance of our 
highest, truest possibility. . . . They 
are the type of what we always might and 
ought to be. For the exceptionalness of an 
event is not properly measured by its rarity. 
The exception is the departure from the law 
of life, whether it comes rarely or comes often. 
If the law of a man's life, the standard, the 
ideal of it, is that he shall be true, and ninety- 
nine times to-day he lies and only once he tells 
the truth, those ninety-nine times are really 
ninety-nine exceptions. Once, only once, he 
has been his true self, conformed to his law. 

If all the world could know that, what a 
great change would come! If we could all be 
sure that our best is our most natural — that it 
is the evil which is most unnatural; if I knew 
man simply in his intrinsic nature, nothing at 
all of this long dark history of his, I think 
that nothing he could do would be so good as 
to surprise me. It would be his wickedness 
that would seem strange. To keep that feel- 
ing about him, in spite of this long history of 
his — that is the triumph of the truest faith. 

VII. 348, 349. 

All is well, I know, without; 
I alone the beauty mar, 
I alone the music jar. 
Yet, with hands by evil stained, 
And an ear by discord pained, 
I am groping for the keys 
Of the heavenly harmonies; 
Still within my heart I bear 
Love for all things good and fair. 

Whittier. 



196 JULY 15. 

HAVE you been in the habit of thinking of 
Christ as of one so far away, so different 
from us, that what he is and does seems to 
throw no light on what we may be and do ? 
But such a thought as that denies the very 
power of the Incarnation. Here stand our 
human lives, all dark and lustreless. Here 
stands one human life in which has been 
lighted the fire of an evident divinity. Shall 
we look on and see the fine lines and the fair 
colors of human nature brought out by the 
fire which burns within, and not make any 
glowing inference with regard to our own 
humanity, with regard to its unfulfilled pos- 
sibilities and the attainments for which it may 
confidently hope ? Surely not so! . . . 

Let us believe indeed that in the experience 
of Christ there is such revelation of the pos- 
sibility, such confirmation of the hopes of our 
humanity! So only does this life become that 
beacon on the mountain-top, that bugle-cry at 
the army's head, which He evidently counted 
it to be, which it has so often been through all 
the Christian centuries! 

IV. 282, 283. 

Jesus, Saviour, Friend most dear! 
Dwell Thou with us daily here; 
By Thine own life teach us this — 
How divine the human is! 

. One with God, as heart with heart, 
Saviour, lift us where Thou art; 
Join us to His life, through Thine, 
Human still, though all divine! 

Lucy Larcom. 



JULY 16. 197 

A?id He answered to him never a word j inso- 
much that the governor marvelled greatly. 

Matt, xxvii. 14. 

SO the prisoner revealed Himself to His 
amazed and frightened judge. By silence 
often of necessity and not by speech He must 
make Himself known, because the revelation 
is too great for words to contain; because the 
hearer cannot hold the truth and yet, by his 
strange human capacity, can hold Him who 
speaks the truth, Him who is the truth; be- 
cause words sometimes hide instead of reveal- 
ing what they try to tell, — for all these rea- 
sons the Lord often when we pray to Him 
answers us not a word. 

Oh, my friends, if our answered prayers are 
precious to us, I sometimes think our un- 
answered prayers are more precious still. 
Those give us God's blessings; these, if we 
will, may lead us to God. Do not let any 
moment of your life fail of God's light. Be 
sure that whether He speaks or is silent, He 
is always loving you, and always trying to 
make your life more rich and good and happy. 

V. 139. 

All as God wills, who wisely heeds 

To give or to withhold, 
And knoweth more of all my needs 

Than all my prayers have told. 

Whittier. 



198 JULY 17. 

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: 
There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him 
. . . Come over, and help us. — Acts xvi. 9. 

SO far as we know there was no one man in 
Macedonia who wanted Paul. . . . But 
what, then, means the man from Mace- 
donia ? . . . He is the utterance not of a 
conscious want, but of the unconscious need 
of those poor people. It is the unsatisfied soul, 
the deep need, all the more needy because the' 
outside life, perfectly satisfied with itself, does 
not know that it is needy all the time, — it is 
this that God hears pleading. This soul is the 
true Macedonia. And so this, as the repre- 
sentative Macedonian, the man of Macedonia, 
brings the appeal. How noble and touching 
is the picture which this gives us of God. The 
unconscious needs of the world are all appeals 
and cries to Him. He does not wait to hear the 
voice of conscious w T ant. The mere vacancy 
is a begging after fulness; the mere poverty is 
a supplication for wealth; the mere darkness 
cries for light. . . . The "man of Mace- 
donia" was the very heart and essence of 
Macedonia, the profoundest capacities of truth 
and goodness and faith and salvation which 
Macedonia itself knew nothing of, but which 
were its real self. These were what took form 
and pleaded for satisfaction. n. 94i 95. 

O Lord God, hear the silence of each soul, 
Its cry unutterable of ruth and shame, 
Its voiceiessness of self-contempt and blame : 
Nor suffer harp and palm and aureole 
Of multitudes who praise Thee at the goal, 
To set aside Thy poor and blind and lame ! 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



JULY 18. 199 

Knowing that ye are thereto called, that ye 
should inherit a blessing. — 1 Pet. iii. 9. 

THERE are always great unifying truths 
waiting to close around and bind into a 
surprising unity the fragmentary lives we live. 
For we certainly do live very much in frag- 
ments. Our special blessings stand isolated, 
and are not grasped and gathered into one 
great pervading consciousness of a blessed 
life, — of a life brooded over and cared for and 
trained by God the Blesser. ... If you 
could believe in one great utterance of God, 
one incarnate word, the manifested pity of 
God and the illustrated possibility of man at 
once, — then, with such a central point, there 
could be no more fragmentariness any- 
where. . . . Blessings of every sort are 
reflections of that great blessing. . . . The 
manifestation of the Son of God, of Christ, 
gives all other blessings a place and meaning, 
just as the sun in heaven accounts for and 
rescues from fragmentariness every little light 
of the innumerable host which, in every hue 
and brilliancy, sparkle and flash and glow from 
every point of our sun-lit world, v. 199, 202. 

My being, Lord, will nevermore be whole 

Until Thou come behind my ears and eyes, 
Enter and fill the temple of my soul 

With perfect contact — such a sweet sur- 
prise — 
Such presence as, before it met the view, 

The prophet-fancy could not once foresee, 
Though every corner of the temple knew 

By very emptiness its need of Thee. 

George Macdonald. 



200 JULY 19. 

The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, . . . 
and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are 
ye. — 1 Pet. xii. 14. 

IT is so hard to do right, you say. Yes, of 
course it is; and the soul that tries to do 
right does wrong so constantly! But then it 
is so glorious — glorious to do right through 
struggle; glorious to mount from the lower to 
the higher life, and seeing how God has 
bound our perfection to His own, have but one 
confident prayer for both: not, " Father, save 
me from this hour " — from any hour, however 
hard it be — but " Father, glorify Thy name." 
And as to Christ when He prayed, so often 
to us, sharers not only of His struggle, but of 
His triumph, there shall come a voice from 
heaven, saying, " I have both glorified it, and 
will glorify it now again in thee. ' ' Who cannot 
dare all things and bear all things in the 
celestial courage of that promise ? 

VII. 237. 
God's trumpet wakes the slumbering world; 

Now, each man to his post! 
The red-cross banner is unfurled; 
Who joins the glorious host ? 

He who, with calm, undaunted will, 

Ne'er counts the battle lost, 
But, though defeated, battles still, — 

He joins the faithful host! 

He who is ready for the cross, 
The cause despised loves most, 

And shuns not pain or shame or loss, — 
He joins the martyr host! 

Samuel Longfellow, 



JULY 20. 201 

A?id I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled 
with fire ; and them that had gotteii the victory 
. . . having the harps of God. — Rev. xv. 2. 

DISAPPOINTMENTS of every sort, sor- 
rows, sufferings, trials, struggles, rest- 
lessness and dissatisfaction, false friends, poor 
health, low tastes and standards all about us 
— who shall catalogue the troubles of human 
life ? Who shall tell the difference between 
two men who live in different aspects of all 
these things ? Are they intrusions, accidents, 
thwartings and disappointments of the will of 
God ? Or are they (this is what our doctrine 
says they are) Messiahs, things sent, having, 
like the ships that sail to our ports from far-off 
lands of barbarian richness, rare spices and 
fragrant oils and choice foods that we cannot 
find at home, whose foreign luxuriance forces 
its odorous way through the coarse and uncouth 
coverings in which their wealth was packed 
away in the savage lands from which they 
came ? Are they prolific sources of spiritual 
culture, contributing what our best happiness 
could not have except from them, the energy 
and vitality which there is no way of stirring 
up in human nature but by some sense of 
danger, the fire to mingle with the glass ? 

IV. 117. 



Happy is he whose heart 
Hath found the art 

To turn his double pains to double praise! 

George Herbert. 



202 JULY 21. 

WHEN we open our eyes morning after 
morning and find the old struggle, on 
which we closed our eyes last night, awaiting 
us; . . . when all our habits and thoughts 
have become entwined and colored with some 
tyrannical necessity, which, however it may 
change the form of its tyranny, will never let 
us go, — it grows so hard as almost to appear 
impossible for us to anticipate that that domin- 
ion ever is to disappear, and that we shall ever 
shake free our wings, and leave behind the 
earth to which we have been chained so long. 
But the day comes, nevertheless. Some 
morning we go out to meet the old struggle, 
and it is not there. . . . Things do get done, 
and when anything is really finished, then 
come thoughtful moments in which we ask 
ourselves whether we have let that which we 
shall know no longer do for us all that it had 
in its power to do, whether we are carrying 
out of the finished experience that which it has 
all along been trying to give to our characters 
and souls. VI. 56, 57. 

I search, but cannot see 
What purpose serves the soul that strives, . . . 
. . . unless the fruit of victories 
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed 

its own 
Forever, by some mode whereby shall be made 

known 
The gain of every life. Browning. 

Afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of 
righteousness. — Heb. xii. 11. 



JULY 22. 203 

He led them forth by the right way, that they 
might go to a city of habitation. — Ps. cvii. 7. 

A TRAVELLER is going to a great city 
which is his final goal. At the very be- 
ginning of the journey the road leads over a 
high hill. Upon the summit the traveller can 
clearly see the spires of the far-away city flash- 
ing in the sunlight. He feasts his eyes on it. 
And then he follows the road down into the 
valley. It plunges into forests. It sounds 
the depths in which flow the dark waters which 
the sun never touches. But 3 T et it never for- 
gets the city which it saw from the hilltop. 
It feels that distant unforgotten glory drawing 
it toward it in a tight straight line. And when 
at last the traveller enters in that city, it is not 
strange to him, because of the prophecy of it 
which has been in his heart ever since he saw 
it from the hill. 

If we read rightly, thus, the method by 
which God brings His children to their best 
attainment, it is certainly a method full of 
wisdom and beauty. First He lets shine upon 
them for a moment the thing He wants them 
to become, the greatness or the goodness which 
He wishes them to reach. And then, with 
that shining vision fastened in their hearts, He 
sets them forth on the long road to reach it. 
The vision does not make it theirs. The jour- 
ney is still to be made, the task is still to be 
done. But all the time, that sight which the 
man saw from the mountain-top is still before 
the eyes, and no darkness can be perfectly dis- 
couraging to him who keeps that memory and 
prophecy of light. VII. 340. 



204 JULY 23. 



Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am 
God. — Is. xliii. 12. 



NO man is a separate, rounded character, 
independent of any other, carrying his 
own qualities included within himself; every 
man is a medium through which God expresses 
Himself with more or less of clearness and 
effectiveness, according to the dimness or the 
transparency of the character on which His 
light falls. We are like windows through 
which a higher light is always falling; but 
the window is blurred and mottled because at 
some places it is stained deep and will not let 
the light through; and where it does receive 
it, it is always conscious of receiving. The 
radiance with which it shines comes to it from 
without — not it shines, but the light shines 
through it. 

We learn to count men, thus, not by the 
witness that they bear of themselves, but by 
the witness that they bear of God. . . . 
Many of the most subtle and perplexing 
phenomena of human life become clearer to 
us when we have once reached this conception 
of the unity of the universe, of the way in 
which man exists and manifests himself only 
in relation toward God. " Christ is all, and 
in all;" or, in Paul's phrase, "None of us 
liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him- 
self. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we 
are the Lord's." 

VII. 38, 39. 



JULY 24. 205 

No reflection so imperfect 

But it something clear doth speak 

Of a fuller revelation 

Waiting for the eyes that seek; 

Love is made in heavenly likeness 
Though the image be but weak. 

J. L. M. W. 

AS the sun shines upon a bank of snow no 
two of all the myriad particles catch his 
light alike or give the same interpretation of 
his glory. Have you ever imagined such a 
purpose for your commonplace existence ? If 
you have you must have asked yourself what 
the quality is in a man's life which can make 
it reflective of God — capable of bearing witness 
of Him. There is some quality in the polished 
brass or in the calm lake that makes it able to 
send forth again the sunlight that descends 
upon it. What is it in a soul that makes it 
able to do the same to the God who sheds 
Himself upon its life ? The Bible has its one 
great name for such a great transforming qual- 
ity, and that is "love." Love in the Bible is 
not so much an action of the soul as it is a 
quality in the soul permitting God to do His 
divine actions through it. The love of God 
is a new nature, a new fiber, a new fineness 
and responsiveness in the soul itself, by which 
God is able to express Himself upon and 
through it as He cannot when He finds only 
the medium of the coarse material of an un- 
loving heart. VII. 46. 

If any man love God, the same is known of Him. 

1 Cor. viii. 3. 



2o6 JULY 25. 

Here is the patience and faith of the saints. 

Rev. xiii. 10. 

BETTER that the whole calendar were 
swept away and every saint forgotten, 
than that one of them should take anything 
from that perfect prerogative of saviourship 
which is the Saviour's own. But this need not 
be. . . . Christ is more utterly my sole re- 
source in strong temptation, the only Being I 
can flee to, when I see strong men of the 
saintly histories turned into weakness before 
the power of evil, and fleeing in desperation to 
that same Christ, to be restrengthened with a 
higher power than the old. There is a use of 
the saints that can make Christ nearer, clearer, 
dearer to our souls. They maybe like a mere 
atmosphere between our souls and Him, whose 
every particle, filled with Him, has passed on 
His life to the next particle, and so at last sent 
Him down to us pure, as He is, uncolored with 
its own blueness, the " light that lighteth every 
man," lighting us all the more brightly be- 
cause it has lighted them. 

I. 128, 129. 

What is the flame of their fire, if so I may 
catch the flame; 
What the strength of their strength, if also 
I may wax strong ? 
The flaming fire of their strength is the love 
of Jesu's Name, 
In whom their death is life, their silence 
utters a song. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



JULY 26. 207 

I am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, behold, 
I am alive forevei'more ; . . . and have the keys 
of . . . death. — Rev. i. 18. 

IT is because He died that He holds the keys 
of death. . . . They who have under- 
gone and overcome stand with their keys to 
open the portals of life's great emergencies to 
their brethren. The wondrous power of ex- 
perience! And see how beautiful and enno- 
bling this makes our sorrows and temptations. 
Every stroke of sorrow that issues into light 
and joy is God putting into your hand the key 
of that sorrow to unlock it for all the poor 
souls whom you may see approaching it, 
through all your future life. It is a noble thing 
to take that key and use it. There are no nobler 
lives on earth than those of men and women 
who have passed through many experiences of 
many sorts, and who now go about with calm 
and happy and sober faces, holding the keys, 
some golden and some iron, and finding their 
joy in opening the gates of these experiences 
to younger souls, and sending them into them 
full of intelligence and hope and trust. Such 
lives, I think, we may all pray to grow into as 
we grow older, and pass through more and 
more of the experiences of life. 

I. 217, 219. 

Blessed be God, . . . Who comforteth us in all 
our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort 
them which are in any trouble, by the comfort 
wherewith we are comforted of God. 

2 Cor. i. 3, 4. 



2o8 JULY 27. 

And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and 
sang praises unto God.— Acts xiv. 25. 

\\ 7HEN it enters like a flood of light into 
* * the soul of some wretched invalid or 
some victim of relentless misfortune, that by 
a faithful patience under his suffering he can 
glorify God and show forth the power of 
Christ, then what a change comes to him! 
How all is transfigured! How full of beauty 
the hated sick-room grows! There is some- 
thing behind the suffering for the suffering to 
rest and steady itself upon. The light has 
been kindled behind the dark window, and all 
its fair lines and bright colors shine out. In 
the purpose of the suffering the escape from 
the suffering is found; as when Paul and Silas, 
in the book of Acts, sang praises to God by 
night in prison, when they turned their im- 
prisonment into a tribute to their Master, then 
''the foundations of the prison were shaken, 
and . . . the doors were opened, and every 
one's bands -were loosed." 

VI. 51. 



We take with solemn thankfulness 
Our burden up, nor ask it less, 
And count it joy that even we 
May suffer, serve, or wait for Thee, 
Whose will is done. 

Whittier. 



JULY 28. 209 

Mark how the fire in flints doth quiet lie, 
Content and warm t' itself alone; 

But when it would appear to others' eye, 
Without a knock it never shone. 

George Herbert. 

SUPPOSE that years ago there came some 
crisis in your life which taught you the 
necessity and the glory of being brave. It 
was some mighty day of God with you. . . . 
You dared to fight because you dared not feebly 
run away. It was a revelation of you to your- 
self. What then ? The crisis past, the light- 
nings faded and the thunders hushed, you 
came down from the mountain. Ever since 
that you have walked on in quiet, level ways. 
But many a time, in simple tasks which had 
not power of themselves to bring you such 
self-revelations, you have found yourself able 
to be brave with a bravery whose possibility 
you learned in that tremendous hour. . . . 
Men are meeting the petty enemies of the 
household and the street to-day with a fortitude 
and a fearlessness which they learned thirty 
years ago on the battle-fields of the Rebellion. 
Men are bearing little disappointments with a 
patience which was born in them while they 
stood by the death-bed of their best beloved. 
... It is good that the power which is first 
born under exacting and peculiar circumstances 
should then be set free from those circum- 
stances altogether and become the general 
possession of the life, available for all its 
needs. The cloud forms about the mountain- 
peak ; but once formed there, it floats away and 
drops its blessing upon many fields. VII. 343. 



2io JULY 29. 

And the day was dark over them. 

Mic. iii. 6. 

r*\ MY dear friends, it is a terrible thing 
^-^ when one's religion is too small for the 
world, and is always leaving great parts of the 
world's life unaccounted for, unilluminated, 
and is always dreading to have the world made 
any larger, lest this religion shall seem even 
more meagre and insufficient. But it is a 
great thing when the world is too small for 
one's religion, and the soul's sense of the glory 
and dearness of God is always craving larger 
and larger regions in which to range. Then 
welcome all discoveries, all illuminations, all 
visions of the greatness of the world of God. 

VII. 177. 



Then the ever-lifted cry: 

Give us light, or we shall die! 

Cometh to the Father's ears, 

And He hearkens, and He hears. . . . 

They, hardly trusting happy eyes, 

Discern a dawning in the skies: 

'Tis Truth awaking in the soul; 

Thy Righteousness to make them whole. 

— What shall men, this Truth adoring, 

Gladness-giving, youth-restoring, 

Call it but eternal Light ? 

'Tis the morning, 'twas the night. 

George Macdonald. 



JULY 30. 211 



CVERYWHERE the lower furnishes oppor- 
<■— ' tunities for the higher, and is a failure 
unless the higher blooms out of the ground 
which the lower has made ready. It is Paul's 
groaning and travailing creation. It is the 
unity of the universe in which, from end to 
end, there is no hardest, commonest, and 
cheapest thing which, living in simple healthi- 
ness and self-respect, may not become the 
gathering point and manifestation point of the 
most infinite celestial light, — no stone that 
may not make an altar. Reverence the simple, 
the prosaic, the natural, the real; but demand 
of every common thing of life, whether it be 
your body or your money or your daily experi- 
ence, that it shall bloom to fine results in your 
own soul and in your influence upon the 

world. 

VI. 254. 

One small life in God's great plan, 

How futile it seems as the ages roll, 
Do what it may, or strive how it can, 

To alter the sweep of the infinite whole! . . . 
But the pattern is rent where the stitch is lost, 
Or marred where the tangled threads have 

crossed; 
And each life that fails of its true intent 
Mars the perfect plan that its Master meant. 

Susan Coolidge. 



2i2 JULY 31. 

Love mocks thee, whose mounting desire 
Doth not to the Perfect aspire. 

TWO men who have known each other for 
years become together the servants of 
Christ. His spirit comes to them. They 
begin the new life of which He is the centre 
and the soul. How their old friendship 
changes! How it is all the same, and yet how 
different it is! It opens depths and heights 
they never dreamed of. Where they used to 
do so little for each other, now they can do so 
much. Where they used to touch only on the 
outside, now their whole natures blend. They 
have taken friendship and planted it where it 
belongs, in the soil and air of the divine love; 
and it opens its essential richness as the trop- 
ical flower which has been living a half-life in 
the northern soil tells its whole sweet and 
gorgeous story of itself when it is carried to 
the bright skies and warm ground for which 
God made it. 

VII. 312. 

A friend! Deep is calling to deep! 
A friend! The heart wakes from its sleep, 
To behold the world lit by one face, 
With one heavenward step to keep pace. 

O Heart wherein all hearts are known, 
Whose infinite throb stirs our own, 
O Friend beyond friends, what are we, 
Who ask so much less, yet have Thee! 

Lucy Larcom. 



AUGUST i. 213 



Jesus saith unto them, How ??iany loaves have 
ye 2 — Matt. xv. 34. 

WHEN you stand face to face with a 
hungry-eyed creature whom you want 
to feed with better life, be sure that you imi- 
tate your Lord. Be sure that you begin by 
asking him " How many loaves have you, my 
poor friend ? What can you give me to begin 
with ? What has God done for you already ? 
Show me your best, and we will pray to God 
together that as you put it into His hands He 
will bless it and multiply it, till your whole life 
is fed with the grace which is all His but which 
He has made yours by bidding it work upon 
the substance of what He had given you 
already." 

" How many loaves have you ? " It is the 
Lord's first question; and the hands of those 
who really want His help, search their robes 
to see what they have hidden there. One 
brings his joy; another brings his pain; 
another brings his helpless desire; another 
brings his poor resolution; another has noth- 
ing to bring except just his sorrow that he has 
nothing. It is a poor collection; only seven 
loaves, and a few little fishes; but it is enough. 
His blessing falls upon them, and they come 
back to the souls which gave them up to Him, 
multiplied into the means of healthy, holy, 
happy life. 

May God help us all, every day of our lives, 
to come to Christ just as we are, that He may 
make us more and more just what we ought 
to be. 

II. 142, 146. 



2i4 AUGUST 2. 



THE home, school, and shop must be here 
on the fairest hillsides and plains of the 
world for something. If we will not claim 
them for their best use, and by our use of 
them exalt them to their best explanations, we 
need not wonder at the low and godless ex- 
planations which men give of them. When we 
are willing to see in them the ministrations of 
God; when men, asking for the means of 
grace, are pointed, first of all, to the duties 
and relations of their lives as the places where 
they will meet God, where they will find the 
deepest experiences, — conviction of sin, utter 
humility, the need of Christ, and the ideal of 
holiness, — then how the dead earth and all 
that is upon it will glow with a fire that no 
materialism will quench. Till then, so long 
as we fail to use the world for spiritual culture, 
no wonder if it be dead; and who cares 
whether the dead thing sprang from the hand 
of a creator or took shape of chaos by a force 
as dead as itself ? X. 31. 

Not he who spins with subtle art 

The webs of fine philosophy, 
Not he who dwells alone, apart, 

In scorn of poor humanity, 
Nor he who cries, Lo, here! Lo, there! 

The hidden Christ is sure to be! 
But he who treads the narrow path 

Of homely duty day by day, 
And lends whatever strength he hath 

To help his brother on the way, 
Will surest hear at set of sun, 
The Master's loving word, " Well done! " 

J. L. M. W. 



AUGUST 



THE best and noblest natures are marked 
by hardly anything so much as this, — the 
simultaneousness and reasonableness of the 
lives they live. . . . The spontaneousness 
does not obscure the reason, and the reason 
does not hamper and clog the spontaneousness. 
So it always seems to me that it is with Jesus. 
He presses His brother's hands with brotherly 
affection. His brother's sneer wounds as no 
stranger's can. . His mother's sorrow enters into 
its own secret chamber of sympathy in Him 
where no other sorrow can intrude. And yet 
all the while, with all the instinctive value 
which He gave to them for their own sake, 
these home affections all are ties to bind Him 
to humanity, windows through which He looks 
into the depths of human life, interpretations 
to His soul of the wider brotherhood in the 
vaster family. 

Surely here is a noble indication of what the 
family affections may be to all men. 

VIII. 184. 



To Thee our full humanity — 
Its joys and pains belong; 

The wrong of man on man to Thee 
Inflicts a deeper wrong. 



Who hates, hates Thee; who loves becomes 

Therein to Thee allied; 
All sweet accords of hearts and homes 

In Thee are multiplied. 

Whittier. 



216 AUGUST 4. 



IF human sin needs a humanity to judge it, 
do not these weak and struggling efforts 
of our life after goodness crave some sympathy 
to which they can appeal as they go up to 
judgment? What! shall I send these poor 
pretences of holiness up to heaven, this ineffec- 
tive virtue which is not a being good, but only 
a trying to be so, — shall I send them up to lay 
themselves against the fiery purity of God and 
be burnt off like spots of blemish from the 
white light of His perfectness ? Oh, no, give 
me a man! Though He be perfect, He will 
know what human imperfection is. . . . He 
will comprehend what my poor struggles 
mean. ... If we look deep enough, we 
ought to feel, every time when we see a little 
child at night trustfully laying his day's life, 
made up of faint desires, feeble effort and con- 
tinual failures, into the hands of God, what a 
blessed thing it is that there is in that everlast- 
ing God an everlasting Christ, an undying 
humanity, which will take that day's life into 
a brother's hands and count it precious with all 
the intelligence of sympathy. vi. 322. 

Thou, O Elder Brother, who 

In Thy flesh our trial knew, 

Thou who hast been touched by these, 

Our most sad infirmities, 

Thou alone the gulf can span 

In the dual heart of man, 

And between the soul and sense 

Reconcile all difference, 

Change the dream of me and mine 

For the truth of Thee and Thine. 

Whittier. 



AUGUST 5. 217 

TN this mixture of good and evil which we 
* call Man, this motley and medley which we 
call human character, it is the good and not 
the evil which is the foundation color of the 
whole. Man is a son of God on whom the 
Devil has laid his hand, not a child of the 
Devil whom God is trying to steal. . . . The 
great truth of Redemption, the great idea of 
Salvation, is that the realm belongs to Truth, 
that the Lie is everywhere and always an 
intruder and a foe. He came in, therefore he 
may be driven out. When he is driven out, 
and man is purely man, then man is saved. 
It is the glory and the preciousness of the first 
mysterious, poetic chapters of Genesis that 
they are radiant all through their sadness with 
that truth. 

V. 9, 10. 

'T were glorious, no doubt, to be 
One of the strong-winged hierarchy, 

Yet I, perhaps, poor earthly clod, 
Could I forget myself in God, 
Could I but find my nature's clue 
Simply as birds and blossoms do, 
And but for one rapt moment know 
'Tis Heaven must come, not we must go, 
Should win my place as near the throne 
As the pearl-angel of its zone. 

James Russell Lowell. 



218 AUGUST 6. 



And He went up into a mountain to pray. And 
as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was 
altered, and His raiment was white and glistering. 

Luke ix. 28, 29. 

IN Jesus our humanity went up into the 
mountain and was transfigured. It shone 
with light there on the cross. Thenceforth, 
into whatever depths of selfishness it might 
descend, it carried the power of that transfig- 
uration with it. In its certainty that He who 
suffered there was one with it and really bore 
its nature, it knew that not to be selfish, but 
to be unselfish, was its true life. That is the 
reason why so wonderfully, through all the 
years of miserable self-seeking which have 
come since, souls everywhere have come out 
under the power of that cross and let them- 
selves be crucified for fellow-men, and why 
the dream of a world glorious with mutual 
devotion has never been lost out of men's 
hearts. 

Those lives of self-devotion, however humble 
and obscure they seem, have always themselves 
the same power which belongs to the sac- 
rifice of Jesus. They too throw light on 
darker lives. They are lesser hill-tops grouped 
around the great mountain. Such lives may 
we live in any little world where God has set 
us! vil. 345. 

But we would be of those who do Thy will, 
And unto whom Thou dost in love disclose 

The brightness of Thy face, to overfill 

Their heart with sweetness, we would be of 
those. Christina G, Rossetti. 



AUGUST 7. 219 

And Peter answered and said unto Jesus, 
Master, it is good for us to be here. 

Matt. ix. 5. 

TO many, if not to all, men's lives come 
such splendid moments as came to Peter 
on the mountain of the Transfiguration. . . . 
Once on a certain morning you felt the glory 
of living, and the misery of life has never 
since that been able quite to take possession of 
your soul. Once you knew for a few days 
what was the delight of a perfect friendship. 
Once you saw for an inspired instant the idea 
of your profession blaze out of the midst of 
its dull drudgery. Once, just for a glorious 
moment, you saw the very truth and believed 
in it without the shadow of a cloud. . . . 
And often the question must have come, 
"What do they mean? What value may I 
give to these transfiguration times ? " 

The first instinct is to feel that they are not 
complete and final; that they point to some- 
thing which is yet to come; that they are the 
premonitions, the anticipations, of a fuller 
condition, in which that which they manifested 
fitfully and transiently shall become the con- 
stant and habitual possession of the life. 

VII. 333, 339- 
Nothing resting" in its own completeness 

Can have worth or beauty, but alone 
As it leads and tends to further sweetness, 
Fuller, higher, deeper than its own. 

Life is only bright when it proceedeth 
Toward a truer, deeper life above ; 

Human love is sweetest when it leadeth 
To a more divine and perfect Love. 

Adelaide A. Procter. 



AUGUST 8. 



Ye shall know them by their fruits. 

Matt. vii. 16. 



CONDUCT is the mouth-piece of character. 
What a man is declares itself through 
what he does. . . . Character without con- 
duct is like the lips without the trumpet, whose 
whispers die upon themselves and do not stir 
the world. Conduct without character is like 
the trumpet hung up in the w T ind which whistles 
through it, and means nothing. The world 
has a right to demand that all which claims to 
be character should utter itself through con- 
duct which can be seen and heard. The 
world has a right to disallow all claims of 
character which do not utter themselves in 
conduct. ' ' It may be real, — it may be good, 
the world has a right to say, ''but I cannot 
know it or test it; and I am sure that how- 
ever good and real it is, it is deprived of the 
condition of the best life and growth, which is 
activity." 

V. 308, 309. 



Therefore love and believe; for the works will 

follow spontaneous, 
Even as day does the sun: the Right from the 

Good is an offspring, 
Love in a bodily shape; and Christian works 

are no more than 
Animate Love and Faith, as flowers are the 

animate spring-tide. 

Longfellow. 



AUGUST 9. 221 



We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the 
flesh. — Rom. viii. 12. 

SELF-MORTIFICATION, self-sacrifice, is 
not the first or final law of life. You are 
right when you think that these appetites and 
passions were not put into you merely to be 
killed, and that the virtue which only comes by 
their restraint is a poor, colorless, and feeble 
thing. You are right in thinking that not to 
restrain yourself and to refrain from doing, but 
to utter yourself, to act, to do, is the purpose 
of your being in the world. Only, this is not 
the self you are to utter, these are not the acts 
you are to do. There is a part in you made to 
think deeply, made to feel nobly, made to be 
charitable and chivalric, made to worship, to 
pity, and to love. You are not uttering your- 
self while you keep that better self in chains 
and only let these lower passions free. Let me 
renew those nobler powers, and then believe 
with all your heart and might that to send out 
those powers into the intensest exercise is the 
one worthy purpose of your life. You will 
not so much have crushed the carnal as em- 
braced the spiritual. Christ will have made 
you free. You will be walking in the Spirit, 
and so will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. 

I. 364, 365. 

To this life things of sense 

Make their pretence: 
In the other angels have their right by birth: 

Man ties them both alone, 

And makes them one, 
With the one hand touching heaven, with the 
other earth. George Herbert. 



222 AUGUST 10. 



Are the consolations of God small with thee ? 

John xv. ii. 

THEY do not take your sorrow off; and 
oh, . . . whatever be your suffering, I 
beg you to learn first of all that not that, not 
to take your sorrow off, is what God means, 
but to put strength, into you that you may 
carry it as the tired man, who has drunk the 
strength-giving river, lifts up his burden by 
the river-bank and goes singing on his way. 
Be sure your sorrow is not giving you its 
best . . . unless it opens to you ideas that 
have before been unfamiliar; mostly these 
three ideas, education, spirituality, immortal- 
ity. Those ideas are the keys of all the mys- 
teries of life, and so the gateways to consola- 
tion. And it is wonderful to see how, just as 
soon as a man is really crushed and sorrowful, 
God seems by every avenue to be offering 
those great ideas for that man's acceptance. 
He seems to write them on the sky, to whisper 
them from every movement of the commonest 
machinery of life, to fill books with them that 
never seemed to know anything of them be- 
fore, to make the vacant house and the full 
grave declare them. " You are a child of God 
whom He is training. You have a soul which 
is your true value. You are to live forever. 
Know these truths. By them triumph over 
the sorrow that He cannot take away, and be 
consoled. I. in. 

Trusting that sorrow is but love's disguise, 
And all withholding but another way 

Of making richer by what love denies — 
So grows the soul a little, day by day. 

Mary # C. Seward. 



AUGUST ii. 223 

Blessed be God, . . . the FatJier of mercies, and 
the God of all comfort j who comforteth us in all 
our tribulation, that we may be able to comfoi't 
them which are in any trouble, by the comfort 
wherewith we are comfoi'ted of God. 

2 Cor. i. 3, 4. 

THE power of Paul or of any man to grasp 
and realize this high idea of the pur- 
pose of the help which God sends, shows a 
very clear understanding that it is really God 
who sends the help. Indeed, I think no man 
can really mount up to the idea that God truly 
and personally cares for him enough to reach 
down and turn the bitterness of his cup to 
sweetness, without being, as it were, com- 
pelled to look beyond himself. All strong 
emotions, all really great ideas, outgo our 
individual life, and make us feel our human 
nature. If you are not sure that any mercy 
comes to you from God; if, whatever pious 
words you use about it, the recovery of your 
health, or the saving of your fortune, seems 
to you a piece of luck, some good thing which 
has dropped down upon you from the clouds, 
then you may be meanly and miserably selfish 
about it. You shut it up within the jealous 
walls of your own life. It is a light which you 
have struck out for yourself, and may burn in 
your own lantern. But if the light came 
down from God, if He gave you this blessing, 
it is too big for you to keep for yourself. He 
must have meant it for a wider circle than your 
little life can cover, and it breaks through 
your selfishness to find for itself the mission 
that it claims. I. 3. 



224 AUGUST 12. 



Lord, show us the Father, — John xiv. 8. 

IVjOW we are very apt to take it for granted, 
* ^ that however we may differ in our defini- 
tions and our belief of the deity of the Son and 
of the Holy Spirit, we are all at one, there 
can be and there is no hesitation, about the 
deity of the Father. God is divine. God is 
God. And no doubt we do all assent in words 
to such a belief; but when we think what we 
mean by that word God; when we remember 
what we mean by " Father," namely, the first 
source and the final satisfaction of a depend- 
ent nature . . . think how many of us look 
for neither of them any farther back or any 
farther on than this routine in which we live. 
We devote ourselves to it; we deck it with all 
the graces we can bestow upon it, because 
there is no higher fatherhood present to our 
thoughts, because we know no loftier God. 
Now to such a man what is the first revelation 
that you want to make ? Is it not the divinity 
of the Father ? 

I. 234, 235. 

With gentle swiftness lead me on, 

Dear God, to see Thy face; 
And meanwhile in my narrow heart 

Oh, make Thyself more space! 

Faber. 



AUGUST 13. 225 

Through Him we both have access by one Spirit 
unto the Father. — Ephes. ii. 18. 

EVERY act is made up of a purpose, a 
method, and a power. And so the pur- 
pose and the method and the power are here. 
What is the purpose or the end? "To the 
Father we all have access." What is the 
method ? " Through Christ Jesus." What is 
the power? "By the Spirit." . . . In this 
one total act, the end, the method, and the 
power are distinguishable, . . . and what is 
more, each is distinctly personal. . . . This 
salvation, which is all the work of God, first, 
last, and midmost, has its divine personalities 
distinct for its end and its method and its 
power. It is salvation to the Father, through 
the Son, and by the Spirit. The salvation is 
all one; yet in it method, end, and power are 
recognizable. It is a three in one. 

The end of the human salvation is " access 
to the Father." That is the first truth of our 
religion — that the source of all is meant to be 
the end of all, that as we all came forth from 
a divine Creator, so it is into divinity that we 
are to return and find our final rest and satis- 
faction, not in ourselves, nor in one another, 
but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the 
perfectness, and the love of God. 

I. 231, 234. 

Enough for me to feel and know 

That He in whom the cause and end, 

The past and future, meet and blend, . . . 

Guards not archangel feet alone, 

But deigns to guard and keep my own. 

Whittier. 



226 AUGUST 14. 



MAN shall not live by bread alone, but 
by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God," — by every word, from 
the gentlest to the severest, that the eternal 
lips know how to speak. . . . And remember 
this is not a doctrine for the world's heroes 
and martyrs only; it is for every living soul 
when it is called on to give up the lower that 
it may attain the higher life. It is for the man 
who has to give up his dollar that he may keep 
his honesty, to give up a doubt that he may 
win a truth. It is for the young man who has 
to give up a fascinating acquaintance that he 
may keep his purity, to let go a tempting 
chance of business because there is something 
about its associations that is going to degrade 
his life . . . for the woman who abandons 
worldliness to serve her God, who turns her 
back on fashion and its wretched littleness that 
she may go up into eternal life. . . . Wher- 
ever truth and interest conflict, wherever the 
desire to be popular, to be rich, to be wise, to 
be anything else, has to be cut away and cast 
behind a man that he may go on unhindered to 
be good and true and holy, there the law of 
the martyrs and the heroes, there the law of the 
Christ, whose meat was to finish His Father's 
work, and who for the eating that eternal meat 
fasteth from the bread that perisheth, comes 
down and proves itself the law of all true life. 

VII. 162. 

With love for all around 
Our days and hours to fill: 

Thus be it ever found 

Our meat to do Thy will! 

Lucy Larcom. 



AUGUST 15. 227 



God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be 
tempted above that ye are able : but will with the 
temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may 
be able to bear it. — 1 Cor. x. 13. 



ONLY those temptations which we encounter 
on the way of duty, in the path of con- 
secration, only those has our Lord promised 
us that we shall conquer. He sends us out to 
live and work for Him. The chances of sin 
which we meet while that divine design of life, 
the life and work for Him, is clear before us, 
shall not hurt us. When we forget that de- 
sign, our arm withers, our immunity is gone. 
This is what we really mean, what we often 
put blindly enough, when we ask whether such 
a man is a religious man or not. We mean, or 
we ought to mean, whether religion or the ser- 
vice of God is present with him as a continual 
purpose; not whether he is ever tempted; not 
whether he ever sins; we know the answers to 
those questions well enough; but whether be- 
hind all the temptation, under all the sin, his 
soul is still set toward God with genuine and 
strong devotion. If it is, we know that he 
must come out safe. 

IV. 340. 



The lightning and thunder, 

They go and they come; 
But the stars and the stillness 

Are always at home. 

George Macdoxald. 



228 AUGUST 16. 



IN all artificial religiousness, all that is not 
bound to life, educated through life, and 
uttering itself in life, there are gaps and 
breaks. It is the sadness of every Christian 
experience, — the loveless time between the 
moments of ecstatic apprehension; the total 
secularness between the points of religious per- 
formance. . . . The Spirit of God, expected 
only at certain seasons and by certain doors, 
finds sometimes those doors closed, and no 
welcome waiting Him at any other. It is only 
when we know that any door capable of admit- 
ting any influence may admit the blessed influ- 
ence of God, only then can we be hopeful of 
keeping the breadth and variety of life, and 
at the same time of always receiving the cul- 
ture and the grace of God. Let only the 
western shutters be open, and we shall see only 
the western sun. Let all the windows be open 
and expectant, and from sunrise round to sun- 
set there shall be no interval in the unbroken 
light. The sun, in the course of the day, will 
look into them all. 

X. 27. 



Light of the world! undimming and unsetting, 

Oh, shine each mist away! 
Banish the fear, the falsehood, and the fretting, 

Be our unchanging day! 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



AUGUST 17. 229 

All of y on are the children of the Most High. 

Ps. lxxxii. 6. 

TT seems to me absolutely certain that if 
* there is in man a real essential belonging 
with God, if in a true and indestructible sense 
he is God's child, then the reaching out of the 
child's soul after the Father's soul, of the 
human soul after the divine soul, must be a 
perpetual fact, it can never be stopped. . . . 
Agnosticism, Nescience, Pessimism, Secularism 
must be all temporary phenomena; none of 
them can be the settled and permanent condi- 
tion of the human soul if man is the child of 
God. If he is not, then one is ready to accept 
whatever comes; for who cares whether a beast 
that is but a beast dreams that he is an angel, 
or with a bitter wisdom knows his beasthood ? 

III. 122. 



If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness, 
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor: 
There towers the mountain of the Voice no 

less, 
Which w T hoso seeks shall find; but he who 

bends 
Intent on manna still and mortal ends, 
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore. 
James Russell Lowell. 



2 3 o AUGUST 18. 



WHEN we see the man in great trouble or 
great joy grown suddenly religious — the 
glad "Thank God!" or the agonized "God 
help me! " bursting out of unaccustomed lips, 
it does not mean desperation, and it does not 
mean hypocrisy. It means that for once in 
that man's life the true soil of his nature has 
been laid bare, and it has claimed the divine 
relations for which it was made; just as you 
strip the layer of rock off from a bed of earth 
that lay below it, and in a day the newly ex- 
posed earth is sprouting all over with grass 
that you never planted. It has caught the 
grass seeds out of the air. The wandering 
birds have brought them to it. It has found 
them treasured in itself. It puts forth upon 
them its own simple nature, and grows green 
from side to side. The man's hard surface 
may close over when the great agony or the 
great joy is past, and all may seem just as be- 
fore, but he who once has known the move- 
ments of this new capacity never can think of 
himself as he was used to think. . . . He 
may go on living a most earthly life, but he 
knows forever that there is a spiritual heaven 
and a spiritual hell. He never can say of 
himself again, " I have no spiritual capac- 
ity." . . . He has looked upon God, and his 
soul can never forget how it answered when it 
met the gaze of the love and power which made 
it, and for which it was made. I. 152. 

For God, who commanded the light to shine out 
of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God. 

2 Cor. iv. 6. 



AUGUST 19. 231 

Go into the city, and it shall be told thee what 
thou must do. — Acts ix. 6. 

'Tis here, O pitying Christ, where Thee I seek, 
Here where the strife is fiercest, where the sun 
Beats down upon the highway thronged with 

men, 
And in-the raging mart. Oh, deeper lead 
My soul into the living world of souls 
Where Thou dost move! 

Richard Watson Gilder. 

THE final spiritual state of man is pictured 
as a heavenly city, a place of a thousand 
relationships springing out of his human na- 
ture. The training-place of his spiritual life 
must be a city, a place of many relationships 
as well. . . . Continuity, variety, influence, 
reality — these are the things after which our 
spiritual life is hungering and thirsting. To 
grow spasmodic, monotonous, uninfluential, 
unreal, is not this the familiar death of the 
spiritual life that saddens many a closet and 
many a church ? 

I have not said superficially that to labor is 
to pray. Prayer lies behind all ; but I am sure 
that by the finite act of labor the infinite act 
of prayer is helped to its completeness, as the 
soul grows by the body's ministries to its per- 
fect life. Labor which is conscious of minis- 
tering to prayer — that is, of giving the soul 
deeper perceptions of God and of itself — grows 
proud of and rich in its mission. It catches 
much of the loftiness of prayer itself. It 
goes enthusiastically and buoyantly upon its 
way, sowing the spiritual life. X. 32. 



232 AUGUST 20. 



HAVE you grown weary of looking for any 
signs of promise in this dull mass of fel- 
low-men and withdrawn yourself into some 
luxury of self-culture, feeling as if what you 
had and were was too good to be wasted upon 
such creatures as these sick and poor and igno- 
rant ? You must be rescued from this proud 
conceit, not simply by counting yourself 
lower, but by valuing more highly the spiritual 
natures of these fellow-men. You must value 
them as He valued them, who gave His life 
for them, before you can be as humble in their 
presence as He was; and that can come only 
by making yourself their servant. Only he 
who puts on the garment of humility finds how 
worthily it clothes his life. Only he who 
dedicates himself to the spiritual service of 
his brethren, simply because his Master tells 
him they are worth it, comes to know how rich 
those natures of his brethren are, how richly 
they are worth the total giving of himself to 
them. 1. 348. 

And know that pride 
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, 
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt 
For any thing, hath faculties 
Which he hath never used ; that thought with him 
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye 
Is ever on himself doth look on one, 
The least of Nature's works, one who might 

move 
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds 
Unlawful, ever. Oh, be wiser, thou! 
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love, 

Wordsworth, 



AUGUST 21. 233 



ALL life tends to encrust itself, to imprison 
itself within itself, and its crust needs to 
be constantly broken and returned into the 
general mass out of which it was formed, in 
order that the best influences may be received. 
Ever there must be a return to a primitive sim- 
plicity, to a condition of first principles, in 
which the power to receive may be freshened 
and renewed. Do you not recognize that ? It 
is part of the old craving to begin the game of 
life again. It is not that life has been miser- 
able, or has wholly failed, but it has lost sim- 
plicity. ... Is not that craving for a return 
to simplicity just what St. Paul has in his mind 
when he says of the man whom he wants to 
see made wise, " Let him become a fool " ? Is 
it not just this getting rid of the crust of life, 
in order that life itself may be open to the sun- 
shine ? This is what he means by his strange 
word " fool," I think. It may have some ref- 
erence to what the world will think of him 
who accepts the Gospel in its simpleness; but 
more than that, I think it also must refer to 
that condition of simplicity to which the na- 
ture must return before Christ with all His 
great enlightenment can take possession of it. 

VI. 160, 161. 

Wisdom ofttimes is nearer when we stoop 
Than when we soar. 

Wordsworth. 



234 AUGUST 22. 



And when He was come near He beheld the city, 
and wept over it. — Luke xix. 41. 

WE may picture the approach of Jesus to 
our souls under the figure of His en- 
trance into Jerusalem. He comes to one of 
us as He came to that city of His and of His 
Father's. Think how sacred it was to Him. 
Think how He loved it. Think what vast 
precious possibilities he could see sleeping be- 
hind its brilliant walls. There was His Father's 
temple. There was the whole machinery for 
making the complete manhood. And yet there 
was defiance, selfishness, unspirituality, and 
cruelty — the house of prayer turned into the 
den of thieves. O my dear friends, if Christ, 
as He comes to any one of us to offer us His 
salvation, never forgets for a moment what we 
might be in the sight of what we are, and 
never forgets for a moment what we are in the 
vision of what we might be; if He always sees 
our sins in the light of our chances, and our 
chances against the shadow of our sins, then 
what Jerusalems we must be to Him! He 
loves us as He loved that city, with a love full 
of reproach and accusation. He stops as He 
comes in sight of us, and ''beholds the city, 
and weeps over it." I can think of no picture 
which so lets me into the very depths of the 
soul of Christ, as He approaches a soul of 
man which He longs to save, as that which 
depicts Him stopping on the Mount of Olives, 
where Jerusalem first comes into sight, and 
beholding the city, and weeping over it. 

VII. 212. 



AUGUST 2 3 . 235 

YE must be born again," said Jesus. Pon- 
der these divine words of His, and ever 
more and more they seem immeasurably deep. 
To think of them is like gazing into endless 
space. But one great truth which they assur- 
edly contain is this: that life for any man is 
not complete until a deeper and a higher life 
is put beneath and over the mere life of ac- 
tion, into which the soul can perpetually re- 
treat, and on whose breast the life of action 
can be buoyantly upborne. There are men 
who the world thinks are always failing w r ho 
are themselves conscious of a success which is 
a truer truth to them than all their failures. 
They are the men who have been born again, 
and who carry the new life underneath the old 
life all the while. The Master of that new 
life is Christ. The soul w r orried and torn with 
disappointments, haunted by the taunts of fel- 
low-souls which tell it it has failed, suspicious 
of itself, yet keeping still its faithfulness and 
consecration, goes to Him, to Christ, and lo! 
it finds a new fact there. Below its failures 
He has for it success. Through all its deaths 
He brings out for it, as He brought out for 
Himself, life! " I too, " He says, " seemed to 
fail, but in my Father I succeeded." "You 
shall share with me. Ye are they which have 
continued with Me in My temptations. And I 
appoint unto you a kingdom, as My Father 
hath appointed unto Me." 

Whatever failures He may have for us to 
pass through first, may He bring us all at last 
to that success in Him. 

VII. 207. 



236 AUGUST 24. 



Beloved of God, called to be saints. — 1 Cor. i. 2. 

IT is out of the very heart of the discipleship 
that the apostleship proceeds. . . . Jesus 
calls all His disciples together, and out of 
them He chooses twelve. It is.no inattentive 
idlers hanging on the outskirts of the group 
who listen to Him, that he thinks good enough 
to go and carry His message. It is they who 
have listened to Him longest, and most intel- 
ligently, and most lovingly. It is Simon and 
Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip 
and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas; it is 
men like these, the very heart and soul of the 
discipleship, whom he selects and calls apostles. 
And so it always is. Always it is the best of 
the inward life of anything, that which lies the 
closest to its heart and is the fullest of its 
spirit, which flowers into the outward impulse 
which comes to complete its life. The heart of 
any good thing is catholic and expansive. It 
claims for itself the world. It longs to give 
itself away, and believes in the capacity of all 
men to receive it. This noble and beautiful 
truth, whose illustrations are everywhere, was 
it not declared by Jesus when out of the 
choicest heart of the group of His disciples, 
He chose His apostles ? 

IV. 154, 155, 156. 

The footprints of the Life divine 
Which marked their path remain in thine; 
And the great Life transfused in theirs 
Awaits thy faith, thy love, thy prayers. 

Whittier. 



AUGUST 25. 237 



WHEN I see the noble life of a man whose 
faith I believe is all wrong, or is wofully 
imperfect, let me not dare to say that his is 
not true nobleness. That confuses my moral 
standards and throws me into the worst hope- 
lessness. Let the sight of him give me a new 
faith in the power of human nature to be gen- 
erous and good, which can break through the 
most oppressive circumstances, and open into 
flower out of the most barren soils. Let it 
make me ashamed of the small show of gen- 
erosity and goodness which I with my better 
faith am able to display; but let it not delude 
me into saying that what I know is my better 
and fuller faith is a thing of no consequence ; let 
it not hide from me the fact that my infidel 
friend, with all his excellence, would be a finer 
and nobler man than his own present self if 
he believed in the truth and lived in the power 
of that which I know to be the faith of God; 
let it not lead me to forget that the real power 
of a faith is to be estimated not by the influ- 
ence of its presence or its absence in individ- 
uals who may be exceptional, but by its effect 
upon broad stretches of human history over 
wide areas of time and space. 

III. 215. 

Noble, gentle, self-forgetting, 
In earth's best affections rife, 

There is yet one thing thou lackest — 
'Tis the Spirit's breath of life. 

Caroline M. Noel. 



238 AUGUST 26. 



Judge righteous judgment. — John vii. 24. 

THE great question after all is this: Shall 
we judge man by God or God by man ? 
Does light and understanding flow upward or 
downward ? If we judge man by God, at once 
we have true and discriminating thoughts of 
human life. We have absolute standards. 
We have a test of the worth of all we do or 
see. But if we judge God by man, we only 
have over again what the world has been so 
full of, — the persuasions of self-interest, the 
disbelief in absolute righteousness, the chang- 
ing standards of the changing times. Men 
have gone into the sanctuary of their own 
selfishness, the sanctuary of themselves, and 
straightway they have seemed to see an end 
of God. All sense of a supreme and awful 
Fatherhood on which all men depended, to 
which all action must go back for judgment, 
has been lost. No higher power than the 
human has seemed to be moving under and 
giving meaning to the events of ordinary life. 

VI. 124. 



If He could doubt on His triumphant cross, 
How much more I, in the defeat and loss 
Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled, 
Of having lived the very life I willed, 
Of being all that I desired to be ? 
My God, my God! why hast Thou forsaken 
me! 

W. D. Ho WELLS. 



AUGUST 27. 239 



Blessed is the man that endureth temptation. 

James i. 12. 

ANY temptation through which a man may 
go without yielding is a glory and a 
strength. But shall men go on courting temp- 
tations, finding them out, and running into 
them, so that they may come out glorious and 
strong ? Look at Christ's temptation. There 
is one phrase which lights up the whole story. 
Christ was " led up of the Spirit to be tempted 
of the devil." He had a certain work to do. 
That work was not His own, but was His 
Father's. His Father's Spirit guided Him, 
and told Him how to do it. . . . We too 
have a work, a duty. ... In doing our duty 
the Spirit of our Father may lead us into 
temptation, but if He really leads us there He 
w T ill protect us there. If He does not lead us, 
if we go of our own self will, we have no 
pledge of His protection. ... If your duty 
lies right by the gates of hell, walk there 
boldly, and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against you. If your duty does not carry you 
there, you cannot be too fastidiously careful 
for your purity, to keep it out of the way of 
every lightest zephyr of temptation. Such is 
the manifest difference of the temptations into 
which God leads us and those into which we 
run ourselves. VII. 135, 136. 

Evil knowledge acquired in one wilful mo- 
ment of curiosity may harass and haunt us to 
the end of our time. 

And how after the end of our time ? 

Christina G. Rossettt. 



2 4 o AUGUST 28. 



In all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
in. — Heb. iv. 15. 

r HERE will come a world where there will 
be no temptation — a garden with no ser- 
pent, a city with no sin. The harvest day will 
come and the wheat be gathered safe into the 
Master's barn. It will be very sweet and glo- 
rious. Our tired hearts rest on the promises 
with peaceful delight. But that time is not 
yet. Here are our tempted lives, and here, 
right in the midst of us, stands our tempted 
Saviour. If we are men we shall meet temp- 
tation as He met it, in the strength of the 
God who is the Father of whom all men are 
children. Every temptation that attacks us 
attacked Him and was conquered. We are 
fighting with a defeated enemy. We are strug- 
gling for a victory which is already won. That 
may be our strength and assurance as w r e re- 
call, whenever our struggle becomes hottest 
and most trying, the wonderful and blessed 
day when Jesus was " led up of the Spirit into 
the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." 

VII. 148. 



"Tempted and tried! " 

Yet the Lord shall abide 
Thy faithful Redeemer, thy Keeper and Guide, 

Thy Shield and thy Sword, 

Thy exceeding Reward. 
Then enough for the servant to be as his Lord! 

Frances R. Havergal. 



AUGUST 29. 241 



/ was glad when they said unto me, Let us go 
up to the house of the Lord. — Ps. cxxii. 1. 

SOMETHING very beautiful and grand, 
almost awful ... is the yearly gathering 
from every corner of the land to the sacred 
festival meeting at Jerusalem. The land 
swarms and hums with movement. The men of 
the seashore and the hills, they are all stirring. 
Every pass is full, every hillside is alive. . . . 
Every man brought his own burden, his own 
sorrow, his own sin. The problems of the 
year, the things that had perplexed them as 
they worked in the fields alone, or debated with 
their brethren, or met the troubles of the 
household — all these they brought to offer to 
the Lord, to seek solution for them in the 
higher, calmer atmosphere of the temple. 
There was the place where their darkened and 
frightened understandings would find light 
and peace. 

It is an old-time picture. We do not go to 
church so now. . . . But woe to us if our 
more rational belief, instead of lifting all the 
earth up to heaven, only crowds down the hill- 
tops and leaves no heaven, and makes our 
whole earth earthly. 

VI. no, in. 



The Lord answer thee in the day of trouble ; 
The name of the God of Jacob defend thee ; 
Send thee help fro?n the sanctuary, 
And strengthen thee out of ' Zion ; . . . 
Grant thee thy heart ' s desire, 
And fulfil all thy mind. 

Ps. XX. 1, 2, 4. 



242 AUGUST 30. 



// was too painful for rne, until I went into the 
Sanctuary of God j then understood I the end of 
these men. — Ps. lxxiii. 15, 17. 

HOW old the bewilderments of the world 
are! . . . Here, almost three thousand 
years ago, is a poor man who . . . has been 
puzzled because the ungodly were rich, as if 
riches were the appropriate premium of good- 
ness; but when he comes to stand with God all 
that is altered. He comes in sight of larger 
circles of bliss. He sees that God has other 
rewards to give His chosen besides these little 
trinkets. ... So long as he knows no higher 
happiness than prosperity, it puzzles him that 
the bad should have it. So soon as he comes 
to know the infinitely higher joy of company 
with God, and sees that that can be given only 
to the good, — " without holiness no man can 
see the Lord," — it no more troubles him that 
bad men should have the poor counterfeit of 
happiness, than it troubles the solid merchant, 
sitting in his houseful of plain and solid com- 
fort, to see a miserable fop strut by in cheap 
and gaudy finery making believe and perhaps 
thinking that he is rich. 

VI. 109. 



Happier he whose inward sight, 
Stayed on his subtile thought, 
Shuts his sense on toys of time, 
To vacant bosoms brought. 

Emerson. 



AUGUST 31. 243 

And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the 
seashore. — Ex. xiv. 30. 

DO we believe in the death of our Egyptian ? 
What is your Egyptian ? Some passion 
of the flesh or of the mind ? 

It was on the farther shore of the Red Sea 
that the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites lay 
dead. It was when the people of God had 
genuinely undertaken the journey to the land 
that God had given them, that the grasp of 
their enemy gave way and the dead hands let 
them go. You must go forth into a new land, 
into the ambition of a higher life, — then, 
when he tries to follow you there, he per- 
ishes. . . . Not merely by trying not to be 
selfish, but by entering into the new joy of 
unselfish consecration, so only shall you kill 
your selfishness. When you are vigorously 
trying to serve your fellow-men, the last chance 
that you will be unjust or cruel to them will 
disappear. When you are full of enthusiasm 
for truth, the cold hands of falsehood will let 
you go. . . . Seek not the same low things by 
higher means; seek higher things, and the low 
means will know that they cannot hold you 
their slave. 

VI. 65, 66, 67. 



Nor can I count him happiest who has never 
Been forced with his own hand his chains to 

sever, 
And for himself find out the way divine. 

James Russell Lowell. 



244 SEPTEMBER i. 

OVER a broad open plain there blows a 
strong steady wind. It never stops, it 
never changes. All over the plain there are 
men and women on their journeys. Hear them 
cry out. " This wind, this dreadful wind!" 
cries one, all out of breath and gasping. 
" How bitter it is, how cruel, how it hates 
me!" " This wind, this blessed wind! " cries 
another, within hail of him. " How kind it is, 
how helpful, how it loves me! " Are there 
two winds, or has the one fickle wind its favor- 
ites ? No, the one constant wind is blowing 
steadily and is no respecter of persons; but 
one man has set his face against it and the 
other man is walking with it. 

Through this great open world moves God 
like a strong wind or spirit, finding out all the 
public and the secret places of the life of 
man. . . . But while your brother at your side 
is full of the sense of God's love, to you God 
seems the hindrance of your life; His right- 
eousness defeats your plans, His purity rebukes 
your lust, His nature and being smite you in 
the face like a blast that blows bitter and cold 
from a far-off judgment day. Does God hate 
you and love your brother? No, He loves 
you both: but you with your disobedience 
are setting yourself against His love. You 
must turn round. IV. 312, 313. 

The blast that smites thee, face and breast, 

Is God's clear voice to thee: 
" This way is neither joy nor rest, — 

Turn, turn, and go with me! " 

Julia Wood. 






SEPTEMBER 2. 245 

Lead me in Thy truth and teach me j for Thou 
art the God of 'my salvation. — Ps. xxv. 5. 

NO familiarity of religion, no presentation 
of it as a regulative force, no offer by 
Christ of Himself as the friend of daily life, 
must seem to us to depreciate the power of 
our salvation or make it appear to us other 
than the touch of God. There will come to 
you hours of great exaltation; you will go up 
to mountain-tops of vision. The Divine Voice 
will speak to you out of the sun and out of 
the cloud. Those will come in their time as it 
is best. But let no experience and no expec- 
tation of them make you careless or distrustful 
when out of commonest things, out of daily 
tasks, and daily difficulties, and daily joys, 
and the simplest needs of your nature, and the 
most domestic familiarities of life, God speaks 
to you and offers you His Son. Know His 
voice so truly that you cannot mistake it from 
whatever unexpected quarter it may speak. 
Watch for the Divine Light so anxiously that 
you may never say that it is not divine from 
whatever humblest quarter it may shine. 

VI. 294. 

All common things, each day's events, 
That with the hour begin and end, 

Our pleasures and our discontents, 
Are rounds by which we may ascend. 

Longfellow. 



246 SEPTEMBER 3. 

If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, 
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto 
you. — John xv. 7. 

CA'N he in whom the words of Christ abide 
pray an unanswered prayer ? . . . Can 
he in whom this word of Christ's abides — 
" Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness " — go on clamoring with miser- 
able mercenary prayers for food and drink, 
houses and lands, as if they were the first 
things to seek ? Or he in whom this everlast- 
ing word of Christ abides — " In this world ye 
shall have tribulations," — can you conceive 
of him as vexing God with querulous supplica- 
tions to be released from suffering, and not 
delighting God with holy petitions that he may 
be brave and patient under it, that he may be 
purified and made perfect by it ? . . . How 
many times we have complained that our 
prayer brought no answer, when it was a prayer 
that we never could have prayed unless we first 
drove out every word of Christ from its abid- 
ing-place within us! Is there a Christian 
here who can declare before God that he ever 
prayed to God in perfect submission to Christ's 
will, in perfect conformity to Christ's words, 
and got no answer ? Not here; not in all the 
world; not in all the ages! vi. 305. 

No voice of prayer to Thee can rise, 
But swift as light Thy love replies ; 
Not always what we ask, indeed, 
But, O Most Kind ! what most we need. . . . 
For bread may nourish less than stone 
If eaten thankless or alone ; 
And many a pure, desired thing- 
Might prove a snare or hide a sting. 

Harriet McEwen Kimball. 






SEPTEMBER 4. 247 

Thy will be done. — Luke xi. 2. 

\I7HAT is it that you ask for when you 
* * kneel and pray ? Directly, no doubt, it 
is some special mercy. It is the coming in of 
your ship; it is the recovery of your friend; 
it is the opportunity of usefulness which you 
desire for yourself. But do you want any of 
those things if God does not see that it is best 
that you should have them ? . . . Is it not 
His will which is your real, your fundamental, 
your essential prayer ? You must keep that 
essential prayer very clear, or the special 
prayer becomes wilful and trivial. You must 
pray with the great prayer in sight. You 
must feel the mountains above you while you 
work upon your little garden. Little by little 
your special wishes and the eternal will of 
God will grow in harmony with one another, 
— all conflict will die away, and the great spir- 
itual landscape from horizon to horizon be but 
one. That is the prayer of eternity, the 
prayer of heaven, to which we may come — no 

one can say how near — on earth: — 

V. 121. 

Which brings to God's all-perfect will 
That trust of His undoubting child, 

Whereby all seeming good and ill 
Are reconciled. 

Whittier. 



SEPTEMBER 5. 



For if the ministration of condemnation be 
glory, much more doth the ministration of right- 
eousness exceed in glory. — 2 Cor. iii. 9. 

THINK of the minister's necessary relation 
to God. God is the granary from which 
he must be immediately fed, the armory from 
which his weapons must be immediately drawn. 
.... He must sanctify himself that the peo- 
ple may be sanctified through him. . . . Then 
think of the minister's relation to mankind. 
Whatever tells upon his people's characters 
he shares with them. Their temptations and 
their victories are his. He goes with them up 
into the heavens and down into the depths. 
His personal life is multiplied by theirs. What 
is it to live ? To crawl on in the dust, leaving 
a trail which the next shower hastens to wash 
away ? Is it to breathe the breath of heaven 
as the tortoise does, and to bask in the sun- 
shine like the lizard ? Or is it to touch the 
eternal forces which are behind everything 
with one hand, and to lay the other on the 
quivering needles and the beating hammers of 
this common life ? Is it to deal with God and 
deal with man ? Is it to use their powers to 
the utmost, and to find ever new power coming 
into them constantly with their use? If this is 
life, then there is no man who lives more than 
the minister; and the generous youth whose 
cry is, " Let me live while I live," must some 
day feel the vitality of great service of God 
and man, and press in through the sacred 
doors, saying, " Let me, too, be a minister! " 

VI. 339- 



SEPTEMBER 6. 



249 



The spirit of man is the ca?idle of the Lord. 

Prov. xx. 27. 

["'"THERE is a] perpetual revelation of God by 
L I human life. . . . See how at the very 
bottom of His existence, as you conceive of it, 
lie these two thoughts — purpose and righteous- 
ness; how absolutely impossible it is to give 
God any personality except as the fulfilment 
of the intelligence that plans in love, and the 
righteousness that lives in duty. Then ask 
yourself how any knowledge of these qualities 
— of what they are, of what kind of being they 
will make in their perfect combination — could 
exist upon the earth if there were not a human 
nature here in which they could be uttered, 
from which they could shine. Only a person 
can truly utter a person. Only from a charac- 
ter can a character be echoed. You might 
write it all over the skies that God was just, 
but it would not burn there. It would be, at 
best, only a bit of knowledge; never a Gospel; 
never something which it would gladden the 
hearts of men to know. That comes only 
when a human life, capable of a justice like 
God's, made just by God, glows with His 
justice in the eyes of men, a candle of the 
Lord. 

II. 6. 

As the planets to the sun, 

We would moor our souls to Thee; 

Kindle us, All-Heavenly One, 
Torches of Thy truth to be! 

Lucy Larcom, 



250 SEPTEMBER 7. 

Methinks we do as fretful children do, 

Leaning their faces on the window-pane 

To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's 

stain, 
And shut the sky and landscape from their view ; 
And thus, alas! — since God the Maker drew 
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain, 
The life beyond us and our souls in pain — 
We miss the prospect which we're called unto. 

Be still and strong, 

O man, my brother, hold thy sobbing breath, 
And keep thy soul's large window pure from 

wrong, 
That so, as life's appointment issueth, 
Thy vision may be clear to watch, along 
The sunset, consummation-lights of death. 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

PAUL tells of Christians who " through fear 
of death are all their lifetime subject to 
bondage." There are some men and women 
who haunt their lives and make them cheerless, 
for fear they will not be able to meet the king 
of terrors when he comes. Dear friends, learn 
from your Saviour that no duty reveals itself 
till we approach it. The duty of death, when 
you approach it, will light itself up, you may 
be sure, and seem very easy to your soul. Till 
then do not trouble yourself about it. To 
live, and not to die, is your work now. When 
your time comes the Christ who conquered 
death will prove Himself its Lord, and pave 
the narrow river to a sea of glass for you to 
cross. The work of life is living, and not, as 
we are so often told, preparing to die, except 
by living well. VII. 235. 



SEPTEMBER 8. 251 

Whatsoever/' ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord. 

Col. iii. 23. 

AN act of yours is not simply the thing you 
do: it is the reason why you do it. Why 
are you selling your goods ? If without false- 
hood you can say, " Because it is my duty, in 
order that I may maintain my family and serve 
my generation and honor God by useful- 
ness," then certainly the act opens itself and 
becomes a church. It is the house of God. It 
is the gate of heaven. ... In every act con- 
sciously and devoutly done for God's sake, 
God gives Himself to the soul and feeds it, in 
the act; not after it and in reward of it, but 
in it. 

Seek your life's nourishment in your life's 
work. Do not think that after you have 
bought or sold or studied or taught, you will 
go into your closet and open your Bible, and 
repair the damage and the loss that your day's 
life has left you. Do those things certainly, but 
also insist that your buying or selling or study- 
ing or teaching shall itself make you brave, 
patient, pure and holy! Do not let your oc- 
cupation pass you by, and leave you only the 
basest and poorest of its benefits — the money 
with which it fills your purse. Compel it to 
give up to you the charity and faith and char- 
acter and godliness which it has as its heart, 
which it hides charily, but which it must give 
to you if you insist upon it and are able to 
receive it. 

IV. 238, 242. 



252 SEPTEMBER 9. 

I will lift mine eyes unto the hills , from whence 
cometh my help. — Ps. cxxi. 1. 

I TURN to Jesus, and in all His human life 
there seems to me nothing more divine 
than the instinctive and unerring way in which 
He always reached up to the highest, and re- 
fused to be satisfied with any lower help. In 
the desert the Devil offered Him bread, good 
wholesome bread. Apparently He could have 
had it if He would; but he replied, " Man shall 
not live by bread alone, but by the word of 
God." . . . On the cross they held up to Him 
the sponge full of vinegar; but the thirst that 
was in Him demanded a deeper satisfaction, 
and He gave His soul to His Father and finished 
His obedient work. So it was everywhere with 
him. The souls beside Him found their helps 
and satisfactions in the superficial things of 
earth. . . . He could not rest anywhere till 
He had found God His Father, and laid the 
burden which was crushing Him into the bosom 
of the eternal strength and the exhaustless love. 
It is your privilege and mine, as children of 
God, to be satisfied with no help but the help 
of the highest. When we are content to seek 
strength or comfort or truth or salvation from 
any hand short of God's, we are disowning 
our childhood and dishonoring our Father. 

II. 285. 

Oh! there is never sorrow of heart 
That shall lack a timely end, 

If but to God we turn, and ask 
Of Him to be our friend. 

Wordsworth. 



SEPTEMBER 10. 253 

What is the chaff to the wheat ? saith the Lord. 

Jer. xxiii. 24. 

NEVER be afraid to bring the transcendent 
mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and 
death and resurrection, to the help of the 
humblest and commonest of human wants. 
There is a sort of preaching which keeps them 
for the great emergencies, and soothes the 
common sorrows and rebukes the common 
sins with lower considerations of economy. 
Such preaching fails. It neither appeals to 
the lower nor to the higher perceptions of 
mankind. It is useful neither as law nor gos- 
pel. It is like a river that is frozen too hard 
to be navigable but not hard enough to bear. 
Never fear to bring the sublimest motives to 
the smallest duty, and the most infinite com- 
fort to the smallest trouble. They will prove 
that they belong there if only the duty and 
the trouble are real. 

IX. 27. 



For He w T ho bore ail sorrow weighed, 
Nailed to His own, each lesser cross; 

He knows the burden on us laid, 
The secret pain, the hidden loss. 

Touched with our woes, He lifteth up 
The humblest follower in His train; 

He maketh sweet the bitter cup, 
And death itself is blessed gain. 

Harriet McEwen Kimball. 



254 SEPTEMBER it. 

TJOW many of us have said, "I will love 
* * God; I ought to, and I will," and so 
have wrestled and struggled to do what they 
could not do, — what in their hearts they knew 
no real reason for doing, — and have miserably 
failed, and now are satisfying themselves with 
loveless obedience, or else have left God alto- 
gether and tell their hearts that they must 
forego all such beautiful, hopeless ambitions. 
Ah, my friend, what you need is to get away 
round upon the other side of the whole matter. 
It is not whether you love God but whether 
God loves you. If He does, and if you can 
know that He does, then give yourself up to- 
tally and unquestioningly to the assurance of 
that love. Rejoice in it by day and night. Go 
singing for the joy of it about your work and 
your play. And as you go singing for joy 
that God loves you, behold the response is 
born before you know it, and you are loving 
God as countless souls have always loved 
Him, "because He first loved us." 

V. 51. 

If I Him but have, 

If He be but mine, 
If my heart, hence to the grave, 

Ne'er forgets His love divine — 
Know I naught of sadness, 
Feel I naught but worship, love, and gladness. 

George Macdonald. 



SEPTEMBER 12. 255 

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God . . . with all thy mind. 

Matt. xvii. 37. 

EVERYWHERE, to think that divine truth 
lies beyond or away from the intelligence 
of man, is at once to make divine truth unreal 
and unpractical, and to condemn the human 
intelligence to dealing not with the highest, 
but only with the lowest themes. . . . Love 
God with all your mind, because your mind, 
like all the rest of you, belongs to Him, and 
it is not right that you should give Him only a 
part to whom belongs the whole. When the 
procession of your powers goes up joyfully 
singing to worship in the temple, do not leave 
the noblest of them all behind to cook the 
dinner and to tend the house. Give your in- 
telligence to God. Know all that you can 
know about Him. In spite of all disappoint- 
ment and weakness, insist on seeing all that 
you can see now through the glass darkly, so 
that hereafter you may be ready when the time 
for seeing face to face shall come! 

III. 41, 42. 



No religion that does not think is strong. 
. . . Mysticism, disowning doctrine and depre- 
ciating law, asserts that religion belongs to 
feeling, and that there is no truth but love. . . . 
The hard theology is bad. The soft theology 
is worse. . . . Value no feeling which is not 
the child of truth and the father of duty. 

IX. 243, 244. 



2 5 6 SEPTEMBER 13. 

OH, how we separate our knowing and our 
obeying powers, our mental and our 
moral natures, as if either of them could live 
without the other! No, the promise that we 
shall know includes the promise that we shall 
obey. So it attains its fullest richness. 

When we say that, eternity springs into life 
and lives. No longer a bare doctrine, no 
longer a great, arid fact, that we shall live 
forever, but a great, actual reality! Hark, 
through the atmosphere of that belief can you 
not hear the music of the activity which fills 
the streets of the New Jerusalem ? I hear the 
feet hurrying over the glassy pavements, the 
voices calling to each other in the joy of ser- 
vice, the ringing of the hammers on the anvils 
where in the fire of the love of God, the per- 
fect obedience of His redeemed is forging His 
perfect will into the instruments of perfect 
deeds. . . . You need not live alone, for you 
may, if you will, know and obey God. You 
and God, you and God, one system of power 
knit together in mutual knowledge, and in 
common standards. That is what Christ 
claimed you for. . . . Come by Him to the 
Father, and then live! O Christ, draw us, 
thy Father's children, to our Father now! 

IV. 295. 



I need drawing, yea, much drawing. 
For unless Thou drawest, 
No one comes, no one follows, 
Because every one turneth to himself. 

Thomas a Kempis. 



SEPTEMBER 14. 257 

Now I know in part ; but then I shall know 
even as I ain known.— 1 Cor. xiii. 12. 

THE more one thinks and studies, the more 
he becomes aware how infinite is truth. 
. . . Upon the subject which we know best we 
are still out at sea. Every time a fellow-man's 
finger touches our faith, it makes it rock, and 
compels us to feel that, however well anchored 
it is, so that it will not drift, it is very far 
from being bolted and mortised into the solid 
ground. . . . We know this is not good; 
yet we very often do not see how it is to be 
escaped. The real escape, I think, lies here. 
The Christian faith is not primarily a belief in 
Christian truth, but a belief in Christ. All 
truth which we believe, we believe in and be- 
cause of Him. We know that though we have 
truly taken Him for our Master, He is very 
far yet from having told us all that He has to 
tell. That knowledge binds us to Him not 
merely by what He has already taught us, but 
by the far greater truth which He is keeping 
for us, which He will give us in His good time. 

III. 304, 305. 

For veils of hope before Thee drawn, 
For mists that hint the immortal coast 

Hid in Thy farthest, faintest dawn, — 
My God, for these I thank Thee most. 

Joy, joy! to see, from every shore 

Whereon my step makes pressure fond, 

Thy sunrise reddening still before! — 

More light, more love, more life beyond! 

Lucy Larcom. 



258 SEPTEMBER 15. 

Now we see through a glass darkly, but then 
face to face. — 2 Cor. xiii. 12. 

It doth not yet appear what we shall be, bid we 
know that when He shall appear, we shall be like 
Him. — 1 John iii. 2. 

ALL these words reach forward. They all 
own a present incompleteness. The soul 
which uses them is discontented, and lives 
upon its hope. And when their great fulfil- 
ment comes, he who has entered into the joy 
they promise will look back as from a moun- 
tain top, and see all experience till then only 
as the climbing, shining stairway, so built that 
along it this complete destiny, this entire life, 
might be attained. XII. 21. 

Enough that blessings undeserved 
Have marked my erring track; 

That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved 
His chastenings turned me back, — 

That more and more a Providence 

Of love is understood, 
Making the springs of time and sense 

Sweet with eternal good, — 

That care and trial seem at last, 

Through memory's sunset air, 
Like mountain ranges overpast 

In purple distance fair, — 

That all the jarring notes of life 

Seem blending in a psalm, 
And all the angles of its strife 

Slow rounding into calm. Whittier. 



SEPTEMBER 16. 259 



The Beautiful Gate of the teinple. — Acts iii. 10. 

EVERY human life starts in the beautiful 
mystery of childhood. Through that 
Beautiful Gate every man comes into the tem- 
ple. . . . And that sets us to asking whether 
to the beautiful temple of a mature religious 
life there is also a beautiful gate. . . . Here 
are children all among us, and yet we often 
talk to one another as if nobody under twenty 
had anything to do with the great things which 
are of such unspeakable importance after we 
have come of age. . . . The current idea of 
the churches, which has only just begun to be 
dislodged, that adult conversion is the type 
and intended rule of Christianity, comes largely 
from the fact that the first preachers had of 
necessity to be occupied with men who had 
known nothing of Christianity in their youth. 
Peter and Paul had to go to grown-up men, 
and ask them to begin the Christian life. But 
surely that was not to be the perpetual picture 
of Christian culture. Christ w 7 as too human for 
that. . . . Christ had been too evidently a 
child; the Incarnation had too evidently taken 
all of life into its benediction for the children 
ever to be wholly counted out. 

IV. 12S, 129, 130. 

The innocence that is so wise, 
The trust that dreams of no disguise, 
The simple faith in mysteries, — 
These still shall in the world survive 
So long as God doth children give, 
To keep the child in us alive. 

Samuel Longfellow. 



2 6o SEPTEMBER 17. 



WE hear much in these days of the preco- 
city of childhood. . . . Josephus tells 
us that once in the siege of Jerusalem this 
golden gate which we have made the image of 
childhood, " was seen to be opened of its own 
accord about the sixth hour of the night." 
Some thought it was a good omen, "as if God 
did open to them the gate of happiness." 
Others thought it was very bad, " as if the gate 
were open to the advantage of their enemies." 
So in this critical time of ours, not the least 
critical sign is this: that the golden gate stands 
open wide, that childhood is exposed and sensi- 
tive to new impressions and ideas. Is it for 
good or evil ? . . . The wider open the gate 
the better, if only the truth can be poured in. 
The more receptive the children's life the 
better, if only they who train the children can 
thoroughly believe that there is a manly and 
beautiful religion of which the child is capa- 
ble, and work with God to bring their children 
to it. When that conviction takes possession 
of the Church, then the Church shall indeed 
have her children in her arms. Then Isaiah's 
vision of the complete New Jerusalem shall be 
fulfilled: "Thou shalt call thy walls salva- 
tion, and thy gates praise." 

IV. 150. 

" Beautiful gates are for beautiful things, — 
Beautiful thought on beautiful wings, 
Beautiful love that heavenward springs." 



SEPTEMBER 18. 261 



IN almost every Christian's experience come 
times of despondency and gloom, when 
there seems to be a depletion of the spiritual 
life, when the fountains that used to burst and 
sing with water are grown dry, when love is 
loveless, and hope hopeless, and enthusiasm so 
utterly dead and buried that it is hard to be- 
lieve that it ever lived. At such times there is 
nothing for us to do but hold with eager hands 
to the bare, rocky truths of our religion, as 
a shipwrecked man hangs to a strong, rugged 
cliff when the great retiring wave and all the 
little eddies all together are trying to sweep 
him back into the deep. . . . Then, when the 
tide turns, and we can hold ourselves lightly 
where we once had to hang heavily, when faith 
grows easy, and God and Christ and responsi- 
bility and eternity are once more the glory and 
delight of happy days and peaceful nights, 
then certainly there is something new in them, 
— a new color, a new warmth. The soul has 
caught a new idea of God's love when it has 
not only been fed but rescued by Him. 

IV. 120. 

I know not what the future hath 

Of marvel or surprise, 
Assured alone that life and death 

His mercy underlies. 

I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air; 

I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care. 

Whittier. 



262 SEPTEMBER 19. 

And one of them, when he saw that he was 
healed, turned back, and fell down on his face at 
His feet, giving Him thanks. 

Luke xvii. 15, 16. 

THERE is such a difference between coming 
out of sorrow thankful for relief, and 
coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with 
and trust in Him who has released us. Nine 
lepers hurry off to show themselves with their 
white skins to the priest.. One leper only 
waits to cast himself at the feet of Jesus and 
worship Him. Tell me, will not those nine 
be different from that one if ever a new dis- 
ease should fall upon them all ? 

Let that one leper be the type of the soul 
to whom the whole blessedness of a blessing 
from Christ has come. Not only the health 
but the Healer he delights in. Not only the 
salvation but the Saviour is his glory and his 
joy. Such souls there are; souls to w T hich all 
the deliverances and the educations that have 
filled their past lives are precious, not merely 
for the safety and the instruction which they 
have brought, but far more for the personal 
knowledge of the Deliverer and the Teacher 
which has been won in them, and in whose 
strength the soul looks on and faces all that 
the future has to bring without a fear. 

II. 333- 



Faith sees the future in the past: 
Its Saviour is its First and Last. 









SEPTEMBER 20. 263 

Y\ 7E cannot believe in our Christ for our- 
* * selves, unless we believe in Him for all 
the world. The more deeply we believe in 
Him for ourselves, the more certain we shall 
be that he is the Saviour of the world. A deeper 
personal faith, a more complete discipleship, 
that is what you want. Have that, and the 
apostleship must come. If there is any part of 
your life not wholly consecrated to Him, if 
there is any of His love which you have not 
appropriated, if there is any undone duty 
which, as you do it, will open a new door into 
His heart, if there is any word by speaking 
which you may the more utterly commit your- 
self to Him; just as surely as in any of these 
ways you deepen your own spiritual life and 
make Jesus more your Saviour, just so surely 
you will believe in Foreign Missions, and long 
to tell all men that He is their Saviour too. 

IV. 172. 



Oh, if our brother's blood cry out at us, 

How shall we meet Thee who hast loved us 
all, — 

Thee whom we never loved, not loving him ? 

The unloving cannot chant with seraphim, 

Bear harp of gold or palm victorious, 
Or face the vision beatifical. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



264 SEPTEMBER 21. 

Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and 
said, Why could not we cast him out ? 

Matt. xvii. 9. 

IN our story Christ, when He came and found 
the Disciples helpless before their task, put 
forth His hand and healed the sick boy with 
no help of theirs. But that was an excep- 
tional event. . . . The great method of His 
operation when it was thoroughly established 
was to work through obedient men. It was 
Matthew's obedience in the hand of Christ's 
commandment that saved Matthew. ... If 
any of you are struggling with your sins, I 
beg you to learn the truth and see it wholly. 
You cannot cast them out, but if you will give 
yourself to Him, He can cast them out with 
you. Hate your sins for His sake; let His 
love fill you with love, and then the conquer- 
ing of your sins by His help shall be in its 
course one long enthusiasm, and at the end a 
glorious success. III. 198, 199. 

I could not do without Thee, 

Saviour of the lost! 

Whose precious blood redeemed me, 

At such tremendous cost. 
I could not do without Thee; 

1 cannot stand alone; 

I have no strength or goodness, 

No wisdom of my own. 
But Thou, beloved Saviour, 

Art all in all to me; 
And weakness will be power, 

If leaning hard on Thee. 

Frances R. Havergal* 






SEPTEMBER 22. 265 



The good will of Him that dwelt in the bush. 

Deut. xxxiii. 16. 

THE identity of God's eternal being stretches 
under, and gives consistence to, our frag- 
mentary lives. God's eternity makes our time 
coherent. And so it was God in the old bush 
that made it still visible to Moses across the 
eventful interval. He saw that bush when all 
the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of 
sight, because that bush was on fire with God. 
And as Christianity is the most vivid of all re- 
ligions, with its personally manifested God, 
there is a more perfect unity in a Christian life 
than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and 
from its consummations looks back with grati- 
tude and love to its beginnings. The crown 
that it casts before the throne at last is the 
same that it felt trembling on its brow in the 
first ecstatic sense of Christ's forgiveness, 
and that has been steadily glowing into greater 
clearness as perfecting love has more and more 
completely cast out fear. The feet that go 
up to God into the mountain, at the end, are 
the same that first put off their shoes beside the 
burning bush. This is why the Christian, 
more than other men, not merely dares but 
loves to look back and remember. 

II. 40. 

Help me to look behind, before, 
To make my past and future form 

A bow of promise, meeting o'er 
The darkness of my day of storm. 

Phebe Cary. 



266 SEPTEMBER 23. 

THE good will of Him that dwelt in the 
bush." ... In some church-pew, in 
some closet's privacy, in some stillness or 
some crowd, years ago the fire came; the com- 
mon life about you burned with the sudden 
presence of Divinity; God called you, and you 
gave yourself to God. I bid you look back 
and see the mercy that has led you ever since, 
and strengthen your hope and courage and 
charity and faith as you remember the long, 
• long good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush. 
And some of you are standing just by the bush- 
side still, the shoes off your feet, the voice of 
God in your ears, lifted up with the desire for 
the new life of Christ. You are determined 
to be His, for He has called you. Well, till 
the end, life here and hereafter will be only 
the unfolding of this personal love which seems 
to you so dear and so mysterious now. . . . 
The mercy which takes you into its bosom at 
last in heaven, will be still the old familiar 
good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush. 

II. 58. 



My soul is melted by that love, 

So tender and so true; 
I can but cry: My God and Lord, 

What wilt Thou have me do ? 

My blessings all come back to me, 

And round about me stand; 
Help me to climb their dizzy stairs, 

Until I touch Thy hand! 

Alice Cary. 



SEPTEMBER 24. 267 

There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out. 

Shakespeare. 

THE sins Christ has forgiven are dead, but 
they are not gone. If none of the dead 
go from us, if when death comes a new and 
finer life begins, and he whom we call dead is 
with us in sweetest, subtlest portion of his 
life, with everything of harshness, every dis- 
agreement, every power of harm taken out, 
why may it not be so with our dead sins ? It 
is so, surely! There is a soul in them which 
lives on still while their body of wickedness 
has perished — a soul of patience, of watchful- 
ness, of gratitude, and of never-dying love. 
O my dear friends, we have not done with a 
sin of ours, we have not finished its history, 
until, long, long after it has died in the kind 
forgiveness of the Saviour, we have traced the 
eternal career of the spirit which its death 
has liberated into life, giving steadfastness to 
duty, and charity to friendship, and unutter- 
able tenderness to the love of the Saviour till 
eternity shall end. 

That is what our sins shall be to us forever. 
They die as sins in forgiveness that they may 
live forever as the impulses of holiness and 
the exhaustless fountains of love. 

VII. 128. 



From rank decay the fairest flowers grow; 
From buried springs the sweetest waters flow. 

Julia Wood. 



268 SEPTEMBER 25. 

JUST as a delightful study, into which some 
^ dear friend first initiated you, has always 
over and above its own delightfulness a beauty 
that comes from your love to him; so the soul 
that Jesus has made holy lives always in the 
beauty of holiness, made more exquisite and 
dear by the loveliness of Christ. Of every 
earthly grace as well as of the heavenly glory 
it is true that " the Lamb is the light thereof." 
Every new attainment which the Christian 
makes is but an entrance into another man- 
sion which his Saviour has made ready for 
him. He grows brave, but Christ was brave 
before him. He enters into self-sacrifice, but 
Christ leads him with His cross. He finds the 
home of his soul at last in perfect union with 
God; but the Godhood is familiar and doubly 
dear to him because of the Christhood through 
which he enters it. All virtue, holiness, and 
truth, throughout the universe, loses the chill 
of abstractness and glows with the warmth of 

personal love. 

VI. 184. 

Love greatens and glorifies 
Till God's a glow to the loving eyes 
In what was mere earth before. 

Browning. 

Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord. 

Jer. xxiii. 28. 



SEPTEMBER 26. 269 

From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I 
bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus, 

Gal. vi. 17. 

IN its clumsy, halting way the outer is the 
record of the inner life. The body is the 
story of the soul. We bear in our flesh the 
marks of our masters. . . . "Who is your 
master?" is the question that includes all 
questions. If a man tries to push that ques- 
tion aside, he declares that he is his own mas- 
ter. And then he bears in his body the marks 
of himself; the faded colors and the scars mean 
only wilfulness and selfishness. But now sup- 
pose that life has meant for that man, from 
the beginning, the claiming of his soul by a 
higher soul; . . . that the life is Christ's life, 
uttering His wishes, seeking His purposes, 
filled and inspired by His love, reckoning its 
vitality by the degree of conscious and realized 
sympathy with Him, — and then it will be true 
that every outward sign in which those inward 
experiences are recorded will become a mark 
of the Lord Jesus, a sign of the occupation of 
the nature by His nature which is what it has 
meant for this man to live. 

II. 357, 358, 359. 



Yea, let the fragrant scars abide, 

Love-tokens in Thy stead, 
Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side 

And thorn-encompassed head. 

John Henry Newman. 



270 SEPTEMBER 27. 

No man can serve two masters. — Matt. vi. 24. 

SHALL you be God's or the world's? Be 
both! Not in any low miserable compro- 
mise. Not by the effort to serve God and 
mammon. But by a brave and filial question- 
ing of God that He may tell you just how He 
wants a child of His to live in this peculiar 
time and under these peculiar circumstances of 
yours. There is a type of universal human life 
in harmony with the best life of all the ages, in 
tune with the sublimest and finest spiritual 
music of the universe, in harmony also with 
the profoundest dictates of your own personal 
conscience, which you can live in your parlor 
and your shop; and that life you can reach if 
you are consecrated to God in your own place 
and time. If you live that life, the world of 
the present owns you and claims you and re- 
joices in you. The most distant life of man 
looks in on you and recognizes you as a part 
of itself, and says, "Well done!" Up from 
your own conscience speaks your self-approval. 
And God your Father bends His love around 
you, and out of His blessing feeds you with 
His strength. VI. 240. 

Take my life, and let it be 
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee. 

Take my will, and make it Thine; 
It shall be no longer mine. 

Take myself, and I will be 
Ever, only, all for Thee. 

Frances R. Havergal. 



SEPTEMBER 28. 271 



TO be religious, to be a Christian, means 
something accurate and specific. It is 
not to be a little stronger than the strongest, a 
little wiser than the wisest, a little truer than 
the truest. It is something more. It is some- 
thing different from all. It is to have taken 
up a new quality of being, which God only 
gives through Jesus Christ, ... to have be- 
come the subject of forces deeper, dealing with 
profounder regions of the nature, than were 
ever stirred before. . . . 

Let a plant try to be a bird forever and it 
will forever fail. It may grow to be a very 
superior plant, unfold a lordly beauty to the 
wondering sun, but between it and the song 
and the flight and the nest lies forever the gulf 
that separates flower-life from bird-life and 
never can be crossed. Let a man try to be a 
Christian forever. The struggle may make 
him, I believe it will make him, a better man; 
but between him and the strength and the 
peace and the love yawns forever the gulf that 
separates man-life from God-life, and which no 
man ever yet crossed save as he stretched out 
both his helpless hands to God and felt a hand 
too powerful not to trust clasp them and lift 
him, whither he knew not, till lo! the gulf was 
crossed, and he had entered on the new life 
that they live who live in God. 

VII. 160. 

I?i Thy presence is fulness of joy. — Ps. xvi. 11. 



272 SEPTEMBER 29. 

NOTICE the mysterious personalness with 
which sin presents itself as a tempter to 
the hearts of men, — what we usually hear 
stated as the doctrine of " besetting sins." 
. . . Why is it that he who is most liable to 
pride, has such continual incitements to over- 
weening vanity ? Why is it that the poor ine- 
briate, trying to give up his drink, finds the 
whole world full of beckoning fingers and 
tempting voices that keep calling back again 
his dying passions into life ? To the light and 
over-frivolous character all nature shapes itself 
into a chorus and sings siren songs to scare 
incipient thoughtfulness away. . . . Does it 
not seem that we are living in the midst of 
mysterious forces leagued against our souls, — 
that our enemy is mysterious, is superhuman ? 
Mysterious and superhuman, then, must be our 
safety and defence. . . . "We wrestle not 
against flesh and blood, but against . . . 
powers, against the rulers of the darkness of 
this world." 

VI. 9, 10, 27. 

Michael, the leader of the hosts of God, 
Who warred with Satan for the body of him 
Whom, living, God had loved! If cherubim 
With cherubim contended for one clod 
Of human dust, for forty years that trod 
The gloomy desert of man's chastisement, 
Are there not ministering angels sent 
To battle with the devils that roam abroad, 
Clutching at living souls ? The living, still, 
The living, they shall praise Thee! 

Dinah Muloch Craik. 



SEPTEMBER 30. 273 

When Jacob slept in Bethel, and there dreamed 

Of angels ever climbing and descending 
A ladder, whose last height of splendor seemed 
With glory of the Ineffable Presence blend- 
ing, . . . 
Foretold they His descent, the Son of God, 
Who humbly clothed Himself in vestments 
mortal, 
And so, encumbered with our weakness, trod 
With us the stairway to His Father's portal — ■ 
To life whose inner secret none can win 
Save by surmounting earthliness and sin ? 

Lucy Larcom. 



BE sure that you mount up to Christ by 
gaining His view of yourself, and that 
you do not drag Him down to yourself by 
your selfishness, and then you may freely claim 
Him in your commonest life, and bid Him do, 
and honor Him for doing, the work which He 
craves and delights in when He says: " I am 
among you as He that serveth." ... I will 
be studiously on my guard not to mistake the 
cravings of my nature for the voice of the 
coming Christ, but I will not silence those 
cravings of my nature when they welcome the 
coming Christ, — I will bid them speak, I will 
listen for God's answer to them, and when 
Christ does come it shall make the witness of 
His coming perfectly conclusive and complete 
that it is not merely in the clouds of heaven, 
but through the worn and torn avenues of my 
conscious human necessities, that He comes. 

VI. 293. 



274 OCTOBER i. 



If I lay waste and wither up with doubt 

The blessed fields of heaven where once my 

faith 
Possessed itself serenely safe from death; 
If I deny the things past finding out; 
Or if I orphan my own soul of One 
That seemed a Father, and make void the place 
Within me where He dwelt in power and grace, 
What do I gain by that I have undone ? 

W. D. Ho WELLS. 

THERE is a great deal of danger of our 
forgetting that to believe much, and not 
to believe little, is the privilege and glory of 
a full-grown man. There will come times — 
and upon such a time our lot has fallen — when 
men are led to sing the praise and glorify the 
influence of doubt. Assuredly it has its bless- 
ings, but while we magnify them we ought 
never to forget that they are always of the 
nature of compensation. . . . There do come 
times when you must cut a tree down to its 
very roots in order that it may grow up the 
richer by-and-by; but a whole field of stumps 
is not the ideal landscape. The forest, with 
its wealth of glorious foliage, is the true cor- 
onation of the earth. . . . Seek faith — as full 
and rich a faith as you can find. Try to know 
all you can about God and your own soul. 
Count every new conviction which is really 
won a treasure and enrichment of your life. 

VII. 319. 






OCTOBER 2. 275 



Help Thou mine unbelief. — Matt. ix. 24. 

YOU say: " Why is it so easy for others to 
believe, so hard for me?" There is a 
willing and an unwilling unbelief. Man must 
not complain that the sun does not shine on 
him, because he shuts his eyes. If it is un- 
willing unbelief; if you really want the truth; 
if you are not afraid to submit to it as soon 
as you shall see it; . . . then you are not 
to be pitied. To climb the mountain on its 
hardest side, where its granite ribs press out 
most ruggedly, where you must skirt round 
chasms and clamber down and up ravines, — 
all this has its compensations. You know the 
mountain better when you reach its top. It 
is a realler, a nobler, and so a dearer thing. 
... If you can only keep on bravely, perse- 
veringly, seeking the truth, saying, " I must 
have it or die; " saying that till you do die; 
dying at last, if needs be, in the search; then 
I declare not only that somewhere — here or in 
a better world — the truth shall come to you, 
but that, when it comes, the peace and the 
serenity of it shall be made vital with the en- 
ergy of your long search. . . . For perfect 
truthfulness must find the truth at last, or 
where is God ? 

IV. 122. 

If thou seek for truth, and do it, 
Not in vain shalt thou pursue it. 

If thou seek for truth, and live it, 
He who is the Truth will give it. 

L. M. 



276 OCTOBER 3. 



That ye may be filled with all the fulness of 
God. — Ephes. iii. 19. 

THE Incarnation, the beginning of the 
earthly life of Christ, was the fulfilment, 
the filling full, of a human nature by Divinity. 
It made the man in whom the miracle occurred 
absolutely perfect man. It did not make Him 
something else than man. . . . Whenever He 
says to men ''Follow Me," He. is declaring 
that He is man as they are men, that the pe- 
culiar Divinity which filled Him, while it car- 
ried humanity to its complete development, 
had not changed that humanity into something 
which was no longer human. Can we picture 
that to ourselves ? Is it not just as when the 
sunlight fills a jewel ? The jewel throbs and 
glows with radiance. All its mysterious nature 
palpitates and burns with clearness. It opens 
depths of color which we did not see before. 
But still it is the jewel's self that we are see- 
ing. The sunlight has made us see what it 
is, not turned it into something different from 
what it was. . . . One thing evidently ap- 
pears; which is that the developing power, 
which brings the being into which it enters to 
its best, has essential and natural relations to 
the being which it develops. The jewel be- 
longs to the light. And this must always be 
the truth which must underlie all understand- 
ing of the Incarnation. Man belongs to God. 
The human nature belongs to the Divine. 

II. 255, 256, 257. 

I am come that they might have life, and that 
they might have it more abundantly. — John x. 10. 



OCTOBER 4. 277 

That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may 
be able . . . to know the love of Christ, which 
passeth knowledge. — Ephes. iii. 17, 19. 

HEAVEN is not only real because His hu- 
manity is there, not merely glorious 
because His greatness is there. It is dear 
because His love is there — the love which 
filled His earthly life, the love of the miracle 
and of the wayside teaching and of the cross. 
The nearness and the glory might be there and 
yet Heaven not lay hold of our hearts. We 
might be well content to stand far off and 
gaze. We might not want to go there. We 
might not listen for messages, nor send our 
feeble voices forth in prayer. But now our 
Christ is there, our Saviour, what wonder if 
the earth a thousand times seems dull and 
wearisome, and always gets its best brightness 
from that other world in which He is, of which 
this is the vestibule! . . . What wonder if the 
hope that He will some day take us to Himself 
abides calm and constant behind all the tran- 
sitory hopes of life, which are lighted and go 
out again and again, while that hope remains 
always as the deep sky remains behind the 
coming and the going of the stars! 

VII. 301. 



Some are resigned to go, — might we such grace 
attain 

That we should need our resignation to re- 
main. 

Richard G. Trench. 



278 OCTOBER 5. 



Lo, I come. — Heb. x. 7. 

THE great Christian doctrine of the Atone- 
ment tells us that when man fell from 
holiness to sin, there appeared in the whole 
universe only one nature which had in itself a 
fitness to undertake the work of reconciliation 
and restoral. . . . Then comes the question, 
When did that fitness of the Christ begin ? 
. . . What if He had borne forever the human 
element in His Divinity, anointed Christ from 
all eternity ? What if there had been forever 
a Saviourhood in the Deity, an everlasting 
readiness which made it always certain that, if 
ever such a catastrophe as Eden came, such a 
remedy as Calvary must follow ? Does not this 
deepen all our thought of salvation ? Does it 
not teach us what is meant by " the Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world " ? 

And see how such a truth tallies with all 
God's ways. This natural body of ours has 
in itself the fitness for two sets of processes, 
— the processes of growth and the processes 
of repair. You keep your arm unbroken, 
and nature feeds it with continual health; 
you break that same arm and the same nature 
beautifully testifies her completeness, which 
includes the power of the Healer as well as 
the Supplier. So it is to me a noble thought, 
that in an everlasting Christhood in the Deity 
we have from all eternity a provision for the 
exigency which came at last, — a provision, not 
temporary and spasmodic, but existing forever, 
and only called out into operation by the 
occurrence of the need. 

VI. 316, 317. 



OCTOBER 6. 279 



/ am not come to destroy ', but to fulfil. 

Matt. v. 17. 

IT is redemption and fulfilment that Christ 
comes to bring to man. There is a true 
humanity which is to be restored, and all whose 
unattained possibilities are to be rilled out. 
. . . Man is a child of God, for whom his 
Father's house is waiting. The whole crea- 
tion is groaning and travailing until man shall 
be complete. 

As soon as we understand all this, then 
what a great, clear thing salvation becomes. 
Its one idea is health. Not rescue from suffer- 
ing, not plucking out of fire, not deportation 
to some strange, beautiful region where the 
winds blow with other influences and the skies 
drop with other dews, not the enchaining of 
the spirit with some unreal celestial spell, but 
health, — the cool, calm vigor of the normal 
human life; the making of the man to be 
himself; the calling up out of the depths of 
his being and the filling with vitality of that 
self which is truly he, — this is salvation! 

V. 7, 9. 



In Christ I touch the hand of God, 
From His pure height reached down, 

By blessed ways before untrod 
To lift us to our crown; 

Victory that only perfect is 

Through loving sacrifice, like His. 

Lucy Larcom. 



280 OCTOBER 7. 



He answered and said, Who is He, Lord, that 
I might believe on Him ? And Jesus saith unto 
him, Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that 
talketh with thee. — John ix. 36, 37. 

HOW touching in this special story is the 
allusion to the light which the Lord had 
given only that day! 

Jesus reminds him of the lower mercy that 
He may assure him of the higher. ... It is 
as the Saviour of the past life that He offers 
Himself for the future. 

There have been great creative moments in 
the history of the world, as all history and 
science seem to show, — moments when after 
long, silent preparations, suddenly the old 
order broke and a new, as if by magic, came 
into its place. So it has been in physical and 
social and political history. But in neither 
was there any magic. The same force which 
was in the last changing conviction had been 
in all the preparation. The flower is but the 
ripening of the same juices that built the 
stem. So it is with conversion to the very 
last. The Christ who in eternity opens the 
last concealment, and lays His comfort and 
life close to the deepest needs of the poor, 
needy, human heart, is the same Christ that 
first laid hands upon the blind eyes, and made 
them see the sky and flowers. 

V. 213, 214. 



No stranger, but the Friend unseen, 
Who from the first thy Friend hath been. 



OCTOBER 8. 



281 



WHAT will heaven be ? . . . I find manifold 
fitness in the answer that tells us it shall 
be " a sea of glass mingled with fire." Heaven 
will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not 
any mere luxurious dreaming over the spirit- 
ual repose that has been safely and forever 
won; but active, tireless, earnest work; fresh, 
live enthusiasm for the high labors which 
eternity will offer. These vivid inspirations 
will play through our deep repose and make it 
more mighty in the service of God than any 
feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever 
been. The sea of glass will be mingled with 
fire. 

Here too we have the type and standard of 
that heavenliness of character which ought to 
be ripening in all of us now, as we are getting 
ready for that spiritual life. . . . Surely, 
there is a very high and happy life conceiv- 
able, which very few of us attain, yet which 
our religion evidently intends for all of us. 
Calm and active; peaceful and yet thoroughly 
alive; resting always upon truth, but never 
sleeping on it for a moment; working always 
intensely, but serene and certain of results, 
never driven crazy by our work; grounded and 
settled, yet always moving forward in still but 
sure progress; always secure, yet always alert, 
— glass mingled with fire. iv. 125, 126. 

I dare not pray to Thee to give 
The heaven which shall appear; 

My cry is: Help me Thou to live 
Within the heaven that's here! 

Alice Gary. 



282 OCTOBER 9. 

" ]\|0 man hath seen God at any time," said 
1 N Jesus, but [beyond death] the power 
of the new life is to be that "we shall see 
Him as He is." It is our privilege to dwell 
upon the untold, unguessed glory of the world 
that is to come. It is a poor economy of 
spiritual motive which tries to make heaven 
real by taking out of it all thought of inex- 
pressible and new delight, and bringing it 
down to the tame repetition of the scenes and 
ways of earth. But no one listens to the talk 
or reads the books which are written about 
heaven, without feeling that the glory and de- 
light which they speak of are far too com- 
pletely separated in kind from any which this 
world's experience has taught us how to 
value. It ought not to be so. The highest, 
truest thought of heaven which man can have 
is of the full completion of those processes 
whose beginning he has witnessed here, — their 
completion into degrees of perfectness as yet 
inconceivable, but still one in kind with what 
he is aware of now. 

V. 303. 

Our Past had held our Future, like a rose 
That may not yet its perfect self disclose, 

Lest angry winds should scatter and molest; 
So, shut within this narrow bud, its woes 

Were but the crumpled leaves too closely 
pressed, 
And all its loveliness did but enclose 

The germ of after beauty — now a Guest, 
But soon to be a Dweller. 

Dora Green well. 



OCTOBER ic. 283 

Whosoever exalt eth himself shall be abased j 
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted, 

Luke xiv. 11. 

SET a man to work, and if he were great 
enough to be humble at all, his work 
would bring him to humility. He would be 
brought face to face with facts. He w T ould 
measure himself against the eternal pillars of 
the universe. He would learn the blessed 
lesson of his own littleness in the way in which 
it is always learnt most blessedly, by learning 
the largeness of larger things. And all this, 
which the ordinary occupations of life do for 
our ordinary powers, Christianity, with the 
work that it furnishes for our affections and 
our hopes, does for the higher parts of us. 

It seems to come to this, that Christianity 
is the religion of the broadest truthfulness. It 
does not set men at any work of mere resolu- 
tion, saying, " Come, now, let us be hum- 
ble." That would but multiply the endless 
specimens of useless self-mortification. But 
true Christianity puts men face to face with 
the humbling facts, the great realities, and 
then humility comes upon the soul, as dark- 
ness comes on the face of the earth, not be- 
cause the earth has made up its mind to be 
dark, but because it has rolled into the great 
shadow. I. 350, 351. 



OCTOBER ii. 



" His state 
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest." 

TO live in such a universe of obedient activ- 
ity, to feel its movement, to be sensible 
of its gloriousness, and yet to make no active 
part of it would be dreadful. Milton felt this, 
and in his last great line was compelled to 
pierce down to the deepest truth about the 
matter, and assert that he, too, even in his 
blindness, had share in the obedience of the 
untiring worlds: 

" They also serve who only stand and wait." 

Here is the deepest reason, here is the rea- 
sonable glory of that which is perpetually ex- 
alted and belauded in cheap and superficial 
ways — the excellence of work, the glory of 
activity. Many of our familiar human in- 
stincts live and act by deeper powers than 
they know. That which is really the noble, 
the divine element in the perpetual activity of 
man is the sympathy of the obedient universe. 
The circling stars, the flowing rivers, the grow- 
ing trees, the whirling atoms, the rushing 
winds, — all things are in obedient action, 
doing the will of God. It is the healthy im- 
pulse of any true man who finds himself in 
this active world to share in its activity. It is 
the healthy shame of any true man to find 
himself left out, having no part in that obe- 
dience which keeps all life alive. 

V. 265. 



OCTOBER 12. 285 

AMERICA was discovered in the fulness of 
time. First there had to come the long 
education of the world which made possible 
the energy and patience and skill that achieved 
the task. And then we can see how it had to 
be kept until the pressure of the crowded life 
of the old world called for another continent 
to work out to greater issues the problem of 
human history. Then the great curtain was 
withdrawn — then, in the fulness of time. 

So let men work away with their statistics 
and their averages and prove how beautifully 
under all our life there run the great necessi- 
ties of God. . . . The curse or blessing cause- 
less cannot come. And into the clear light of 
all such speculations we may look to get a 
clearer and more loving understanding of our 
God. I see Him now as He stands holding 
back the inventions and discoveries and insti- 
tutions that are to make the next generation 
glorious — more glorious than ours, — holding 
them back until their time is full. The home 
of the future, the republic of the future, the 
Church of the future — they must be built upon 
the present, and they must wait until their 
foundations shall be laid. 

VII. 57, 60. 



God's gracious purpose comes to fulfilment 
Never too soon and never too late; 

Bright o'er the clouded arch of His future 
Shineth the legend: Trust thou and wait. 

J. L. M. AY. 



286 OCTOBER 13. 

WHO are the men who have succeeded in 
the best way, — who have done good 
work while they lived, and have left their lives 
like monuments for the inspiration of man- 
kind ? They are the men who have . . . ques- 
tioned the circumstances in which they found 
themselves, and asked what was the best thing 
which any man in just those circumstances 
might set himself to do ? These are the men 
before whom there rises by-and-by a dream, 
which later gathers itself into a hope, and at 
last solidifies into an achievement. Colum- 
bus discovers America because he is Colum- 
bus, and because the study of geography and 
the enterprise of men have reached just this 
point. Luther kindles the Reformation be- 
cause he is Luther, and because the dry wood 
of the papacy has come to just the right in- 
flammability. You and I, who are not Luthers 
nor Columbuses, but simply, by the grace of 
God, earnest, true-hearted men, conceive some 
purpose for our lives and keep it clear before 
us, praying that we may not die before we 
do it; and at last doing it before we die, be- 
cause we are we, and because the world in 
which we live is just the world it is. 

IV. 322. 



Such faith, O God, our souls sustain, 
Free, true, and calm, in joy and pain, 
That even by our fidelity 
Thy Kingdom may the nearer be! 

Samuel Longfellow. 



OCTOBER 14. 287 

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, 
Whose golden rounds are our calamities, 
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God 
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. 
James Russell Lowell. 

THE final purpose of all consolation and 
help is revelation. The reason why we 
are led into trouble and out again is not merely 
that we may value happiness the more from 
having lost it once and found it again, but 
that we may know something which we could 
not know except by that teaching, that we 
may bear upon our nature some impress which 
could not have been stamped except on na- 
tures just so softened to receive it. n. 272. 

Great truths are greatly won. Not found by 

chance, 

Nor wafted on the breath of summer dream, 

But grasped in the great struggle of the soul, 

Hard buffeting with adverse wind and 

stream; 

And in the day of conflict, fear and grief, 
When the strong hand of God, put forth in 
might, 
Ploughs up the subsoil of the stagnant heart, 
And brings the imprisoned truth-seed to the 
light. 

Wrung from the troubled spirit, in hard hours 
Of weakness, solitude, perchance of pain, 

Truth springs, like harvest from the well- 
ploughed field, 
And the soul feels it has not wept in vain. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



OCTOBER 15. 



Because thou hast kept the word of My patience, 
I also will keep thee froin the hour of temptation. 

Rev. iii. 10. 

TAKE the man whose life has known be- 
reavement, who has passed sometime 
through those days and nights which I may 
not try to describe to you, but which come 
up to so many of you as I say the old word, 
death. Days and nights when he watched 
the slow untwisting of some silver cord on 
which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt 
the golden bowl dashed down and broken of 
which his very life had drank. The first shock 
became dulled. The first agony grew calm. 
The lips subsided into serenity. But was 
there not something in him that made him 
greater and purer and richer than of old; 
something that let any one see who watched 
the change, that it was " better to have loved 
and lost than never to have loved at all " ? A 
whole new quality, that rich quality which the 
Bible calls by its large word " patience, " the 
power of his trial, was in his new serenity, 
until he died. 

IV. 114. 



Grant us, O Lord, that patience and that faith: 
Faith's patience imperturbable in Thee, 
Hope's patience till the long-drawn shad- 
ows flee, 

Love's patience unresentful of all scathe. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



OCTOBER 16. 289 

THE soul which God is training in solitude 
thinks its life wasted because it is cut off 
from society, and the soul that God keeps in 
the very midst of its fellows sighs for the joy 
and culture of being alone. 

If we could only know that in its time only 
is any Christian mood or condition beautiful, 
and that God only knows its time! When 
the day is over the stars will come, and then 
it is good to see them; but to see them before 
that, in the sunlight, you must go, men say, 
down to the bottom of a well, where you do 
not belong, which is unnatural and unhealthy. 
When we have done with earth the heaven 
will come; and, till that, only such heaven — 
and it is not a little — as is possible upon the 
dear old earth. 

IV. 257. 



What Thou wilt, O Father, give! 
All is gain that I receive. . . . 
Let the lowliest task be mine, 
Grateful, so the work be Thine; 
Let me find the humblest place 
In the shadow of Thy grace. . . . 
Clothe with life the weak intent, 
Let me be the thing I meant; 
Let me find in Thy employ 
Peace that dearer is than joy; 
Out of self to love be led 
And to heaven acclimated, 
Until all things sweet and good 
Seem my natural habitude. 

Whittier. 



290 OCTOBER 17. 



In everything ye are enriched by Him. 

1 Cor. i. 4. 

From Thee is all that soothes the life of man, 
His high endeavors and his glad success, 
His strength to suffer and his will to serve. 
But O Thou sovereign Giver of all good, 
Thou art, of all Thy gifts, Thyself the 

crown ; — 
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are 

poor, 
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt 

away. Cowper. 

THE knowledge of God lies behind every- 
thing, behind all knowledge, all skill, ail 
life. That is the sum of the whole matter. 
And then comes the great truth . . . that it is 
only by the experiences of the soul, only by 
penitence for sin, only by patient struggle 
after holiness, only by trust, by hope, by love, 
does God make Himself known to man. . . . 
As the man becomes more pure, more peni- 
tent, more sensitive to the least touch of sin, 
more passionately eager to be good, so does 
he grow for ever more and more sure of God. 
And to him, thus growing ever surer of God, 
the world he lives in becomes clothed with an 
ever diviner light. . . . 

Of heaven it is written that " the Lord God 
Almighty and the Lamb are the light thereof. " 
This part of heaven at least may be begun be- 
low. Not merely the earth we live in, but our 
own especial life — our work, our study, our 
daily toil — may live already in the light of 
God. in. no. 



OCTOBER 18. 291 



Luke, the beloved physician. — Col. iv. 14. 

OF Luke alone it would appear as if he con- 
tinued to do as a Christian the same 
thing which he had done before. In him alone 
we see what since his time has been the natu- 
ral and normal type of Christian life, — the 
inspiration of a definite old occupation by a 
new spiritual power, so that it continued to 
be exercised, and showed its genuine capacity, 
and fulfilled its true ideal. 

Luke must have gone among his patients 
saying, " I do this by the faith of the Son of 
God." Tell me, when he could say that, was 
there no holier sacredness in the finger which 
he laid on the sick man's pulse ? Was there 
no truer sense of sympathy with the men whom 
he saw on every side of him engaged in other 
works than his ? 

Not by deserting your profession but by 
deepening it, by seeking a new life under it, 
by praying for and never resting satisfied until 
you find regeneration, — the new life lived by 
the faith of the Son of God; so only can your 
life of trade or art or profession be redeemed; 
so only can it become both for you and for 
the world a blessed thing. The necessary 
labors which the nature of man and his rela- 
tions to this earth demand, all done by men 
full of the love of God, and each using to its 
best the special faculty that is in him, — the 
world needs no other millennium than that. 

V. 219, 224, 227. 



292 OCTOBER 19. 



And Balak said unto hint, Come, I pray thee, 
unto another place. . . . Thou shalt see but the 
utmost part of them, and shalt not see them all: 
and curse me them from thence. 

Numb, xxiii. 13. 

THERE are parts of it [life] and aspects of it 
which, if they were all, would make exist- 
ence an accursed thing. "Come," says the 
pessimist, " you shall not see the whole. I will 
set you where you shall only see a part, and 
curse me it from thence." There is where 
pessimism is made. The man who sees the 
whole of life must be an optimist. I know 
dark points of view, grim gloomy crags of 
moral vision, hideous observatories on which 
if a man stands he can see nothing but the 
dreadful side of life, its wretchedness, its dis- 
appointment, its distress, its reckless, wanton, 
defiant sin. I can see gathered on those hor- 
rible observation points the despisers, the re- 
vilers, the cursers of our human life. I know 
that if I went up there and stood by their side, 
my tongue would curse like theirs. But there 
I will not go. If there be any point whence 
I can see it all, however dimly, through what- 
ever clouds, there I will go. So will I keep 
my faith that life is good, and work with what 
strength I can against its evils, knowing that 
I work in hope. VI. 212. 

" With patient step thy path of duty run: 
God nothing does or suffers to be done, 
But thou thyself would'st do it, didst thou see 
The end of all events as well as He." 



OCTOBER 20. 293 

Pray without ceasing. — 2 Thess. v. 17. 

DRAYER involves far more than we ordina- 

* rily think, — a certain necessary relation 

between the soul and God. The condition of 

prayer is personal ; it looks to character. How 

this rebukes our ordinary slipshod notions of 

what it is to pray! God's mercy-seat is no 

mere stall set by the vulgar roadside, where 

every careless passer-by may put an easy hand 

out to snatch any glittering blessing that 

catches his eye. It stands in the holiest of 

holies. We can come to it only through veils 

and by altars of purification. To enter into 

it, we must enter into God. 

VI. 308. 



O Infinite of joy and light, 
Wherewith we are surrounded, 

We lift our spirits to Thy height 
Unfathomed and unbounded: 

Thy greatness drowns our petty cares, 

Thy heaven is in us, unawares. 

O Infinite of Righteousness, 
Breath of our inmost being! 

Thy purity will cleanse and bless 
The soul from evil fleeing: 

We hide our sin-stained hearts in Thee, 

And pray, " As Thou art, let us be! " 

Lucy Larcom. 



294 OCTOBER 21. 



YOU cry, " O Lord, solve me this problem! " 
and the solution does not come. " What! 
must I walk in darkness ?" your poor soul 
cries out; and then He comes and takes your 
hand and says, " He that followeth Me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light 
of Life." In place of the answer to your 
prayer comes He to whom you prayed. You 
have not got the solution of your problem; it 
still floats in doubt. You have not got the 
sure prophecy of the future; it is hid behind 
the wavering and trembling veil. You have 
not got the brother's dear presence for whose 
life you cried and wrestled; he is walking be- 
side the river of Life in the new Light of 
Heaven. You have not got what you prayed 
for, but you have got God! You have the 
source, the fountain, the sun! You have 
taken hold of the essential meaning and es- 
sence of all these things for which you prayed, 
in taking hold of Him to whom you prayed. 
In His silence you have pressed back to Him. 
. . . Not in the word He speaks but in the 
word He is, you have found your reply. 

V. 132. 



Reach downward to the sunless days, 
Wherein our guides are blind as we, 
And faith is small and hope delays, — 
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise, 
And let us feel the light of Thee! 

Whittiek. 



OCTOBER 22. 295 

A I 7 HAT man goes bravely and faithfully 
* * through doubt and does not bring out 
a soul to which truth seems to be infinitely 
precious, and the human soul the most myste- 
rious, sacred thing in the world ? Out of the 
union of these two persuasions has come the 
prophetship of this life which now you cannot 
look at without seeing the infinite behind it 
made clear by it. 

Surely, if we believe this, then the way in 
which God lets His children encounter great, 
and sometimes terrible, experiences is not en- 
tirely inexplicable. Surely if these souls which 
are now deep in sorrow, or are being cast up 
and down and back and forth in doubt, are 
being thus annealed and purified that they 
may come to be revealers, mediators between 
God and their fellow-men, then into our won- 
der at the existence of doubt and sorrow in 
God's world there comes a little ray of light. 
Who would not bear anything that could refine 
his life into fitness for such a privilege as that ? 

IV. 15. 

Happy they who learn from crosses, 

Changeful clouds and fears, 
Life may richer be for losses, 

Joyfuller for tears, 
Faith by doubts be clearer made — 
Stronger doubting souls to aid. 

Julia Wood. 



296 OCTOBER 23. 



Though our outward man perish, yet the inward 
man is renewed day by day. — 2 Cor. iv. 16. 



IT is hard for us to imagine how flat and 
shallow human life would be if there were 
taken out of it this constant element — the 
coming up of the spiritual life where the phys- 
ical life has failed. A man who never knew an 
ache or a pain comes to a break in health, from 
which he can look out on nothing but years of 
sickness ; and then the soul within him . . . 
claims its independence and supremacy, and 
stands strong in the midst of weakness, calm 
in the very centre of the turmoil and panic of 
the aching body. The temper of the fickle 
people changes, and the favorite of yesterday 
becomes the victim of to-day; but in his mar- 
tyrdom he sees for the first time the full value 
of the truth he dies for, and thanks the flames 
that have lighted up its preciousness. ... By 
this revelation of the spiritual through the 
broken physical life other men may learn its 
value. This is what makes the sick-rooms and 
the martyr-fires reasonable. In them has been 
made manifest by suffering that the soul is 
really more than the body, that the soul can 
triumph when the body has nothing left but 
disease and misery. 

I. 11. 



Most gladly, therefore, will I rest in my in- 
firmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon, 
me. — 2 Cor. xii. 9. 



OCTOBER 24. 297 

Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thine house. 

Matt. ix. 6. 

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled 
with fire, — Rev. xv. 2. 

HOW does the fire get into the sea of glass ? 
... It is repose mingled with struggle 
. . . calmness still pervaded by the discipline 
through which it has been reached. . . . You 
may go through the crowded streets of heaven, 
asking each saint how he came there, and you 
will look in vain everywhere for a man morally 
and spiritually strong, whose strength did not 
come to him in struggle. . . . There is no ex- 
ception anywhere. Every poor soul that the 
Lord heals goes up the street like the man at 
Capernaum, carrying its bed upon its back, 
the trophy of its conquered palsy. There 
are no glassy seas which will really bear the 
weight of strong men but those that have the 
fiery mingling. All others are counterfeits, 
and crack or break. IV. 112, 119, 120. 

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows 
Like harmony in music: there is a dark, 
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles 
Discordant elements, makes them cling to- 
gether 
In one society. How strange that all 
The terrors, pains, and early miseries, 
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused 
Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part, 
And that a needful part, in making up 
The calm existence that is mine when I 
Am worthy of myself. Praise to the end! 
Thanks to the means! Wordsworth. 



298 OCTOBER 25. 

'"PHIS time of ours, these men of ours, are 
* marked by a singular depth of personal 
experience. The personal emotions, the anxi- 
eties with regard to personal conditions, are 
very intense. It is a time of much morbid- 
ness, and so I think that the danger under 
which men always labor, of letting the universe 
take the color of the windows of their own 
life through which they look at it, was never 
so dangerous as to-day. More men to-day 
think the world is wretched because they are 
sad and bewildered, than would have trans- 
ferred their own conditions to the outside uni- 
verse in less introspective and self-conscious 
times. The simplest men in the simplest ages, 
when they were in sorrow, opened their win- 
dows inward to let the world's sunlight in. 
The elaborate and subtle men in the elaborate 
and subtle ages, in their sorrow, open their 
windows outward and darken the bright world 
with their darkness. And among such men, 
in such an age, we live. 

II. 157, 158. 



We make the light through which we see 
The light, and make the dark: 

To hear the lark sing, we must be 
At heaven's gate with the lark. 

Alice Cary. 



OCTOBER 26. 299 



Our destiny, our being's heart and home, 
Is with eternity, and only there. 

Wordsworth. 

THE history of man bears witness, that 
■ man, though himself finite, demands in- 
finity to deal with and to rest upon; he claims 
to have relations with the infinite. That fact is 
borne testimony to by all the ages; that fact 
is the perpetual witness of the consciousness 
in man's heart that he is the child of God. 
The child may be reminded every moment 
of his limitations and his youth, and yet he 
always mounts up to claim the largeness of 
his father's life for himself. And so man, the 
more you make him feel his.finiteness, so much 
the more obstinately will he insist on his right 
to a potential possession of the infinite. The 
power of adoring love of which he is distinctly 
conscious, brings him assurance that there is 
a being worthy of such love. 

III. I20, 121. 



Into the heaven of Thy heart, O God, 
I lift up my life like a flower; 

Thy light is deep, and Thy love is broad, 
And I am not the child of an hour. 

Lucy Larcom. 



300 OCTOBER 27. 

Behold, as thou passest through things mortal, 

And amidst creatures visible, 

Seeking to be contented with them, 

Thou losest better things. 

Thou separatest thyself from the Sovereign 

Good when thou doest this, 
And turnest away from the true and blessed 

life which is eternal. 

Thomas a Kempis. 

TTAVE you ever stood in the midst of the 
* * world of fashion and marvelled how it 
was possible that men and women should care, 
as those around you seemed to care, about the 
little conventionalities which made the scenery 
and the problems of its life ? . . . There is a 
noble economy of the deepest life. . . . The 
people of Nazareth wanted to stone Christ, 
and He quietly passed away and left them with 
their stones in their hands; but the cross de- 
manded Him, and He went up to the terri- 
ble experience with a soul consecrated to 
endure it all, and spared Himself not one blow 
of the scourge upon the shoulders, and not 
one piercing of the nails into the hands and 
feet. He knew what was worth while; and 
He knew that because He was one with God, 
the Son of God could not count the great 
little nor the little great. That was the secret 
of His perfect life. 

V. 247, 248, 251. 



OCTOBER 28. 301 

And when it was day, He called unto Him His 
disciples, and of them He chose twelve, whom He 
also named Apostles. — Luke vi. 13. 

THINK what they must have been before 
they knew their master. The open life of 
free and thoughtless young men they must have 
lived, easily making friends, easily entering 
into everybody's superficial interests because 
they had only superficial feelings of their own, 
liking to be liked, and full of ready sympathies. 
Then they met Jesus. They were drawn away 
to Him. By Him they were drawn in upon 
themselves. To know Him and their own 
deeper lives in Him, became their longing. 
. . . Their lives were folded in upon them- 
selves, and upon Him who was at the centre of 
each. But by-and-by a new power began to 
work at the unfolded heart. He who had 
drawn them in upon Himself began to send 
them abroad. Another kind of love for their 
old friends, and all the world whom those 
friends represented, came to them. They be- 
gan to be seen again upon the streets. Only 
now they are telling every one of the new life. 
They have been drawn in from the world upon 
Christ, that He might send them out, full of 
Himself, into the world. IV. 159. 

And that Thou sayest " Go! " 
Our hearts are glad, for he is still Thy friend 
And best beloved of all, whom Thou dost send 

The farthest from Thee; this Thy servants 
know: 
Oh, send by whom Thou wilt, for they are blest 
Who go Thy errands. Dora Greenwell. 



302 OCTOBER 29. 



If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt 
them j they shall lay hands on the sick, and they 
shall recover, — Mark xvi. 19. 

IS that a prize ? Is it wages which is offered 
for a certain meritorious act which is 
called faith ? Not so, surely! It is a conse- 
quence. It is a necessity. Safety and help- 
fulness. These come out of the full life of 
Christ in the soul of man as the inevitable 
fruits. Safety, so that what hurts other men 
shall not hurt him. Helpfulness, so that his 
brethren about him shall live by his life. . . . 
It is by life, by full, vigorous, emphatic exist- 
ence that men are safe in this world, and that 
they save other men from death. I glory in 
such a statement as that. It makes my Bible 
shine. Men everywhere are trying to be safe 
by stifling life; by living just as low as possi- 
ble. Men everywhere are trying not to do 
one another harm, trying to spare each 
other's souls by tender petting, by guarding 
them against any vigorous contact with life and 
thought. The Bible comes glowing with pro- 
test. " Not so," it says. " Only by the ful- 
ness of life does safety come. Only by the 
power of contact with life are sick and help- 
less souls made whole. None but the live man 
saves himself or quickens the dead to life; 
saves himself or saves his neighbor." 

IV. 337. 

Light is light which radiates, 
Blood is blood which circulates. 
Life is life which generates. 

Emerson. 



OCTOBER 30. 303 

Hold hard, hope hard, in the subtle thing 
That's spirit; though cloistered fast, soar free. 

Browning. 

1 THINK there never was a materialist so 
complete that he did not realize that the 
great mass of men were not materialists, but 
believed in spiritual forces and longed for 
spiritual companies. He might think the spir- 
itual tendency the wildest of delusions, but 
he could not doubt its prevalence. How 
could he ? Here is the whole earth full of it. 
Language is all shaped upon it. Thought is 
all saturated with it. In the most imposing 
and the most vulgar methods, by solemn ora- 
cles and rocking tables, men have been always 
trying to put themselves into communication 
with the spiritual world and to get counsel 
and help from within the veil. And if we 
hear the cry from one another, how much more 
God hears it, . . . and has prepared a way of 
aid. The power of the Holy Ghost! — an ever- 
lasting spiritual presence among men. What 
but that is the thing we want ? That is what the 
old oracles were dreaming of, what the modern 
spiritualists are fumbling after. The power 
of the Holy Ghost . . . that is God's one 
great response to the unconscious need of 
spiritual guidance which He hears crying out 
of the deep heart of every man. n. 105. 

Heavenly things my soul hath seen, — 
Things the Holy Spirit shows, — 

Things on which the heart can lean 
When the flesh has no repose. 

Anna L. Waring. 



304 OCTOBER 31. 



In everything by prayer and supplication . . 
let your requests be made known unto God, 

Phil. iv. 6. 



TRUE, the most earnest Christian may err 
about the will of God. He may pray 
for sunshine when it is the will of God that it 
should rain. He may ask for comfort when 
it is God's will that he should suffer. But 
this can only come in superficial things. In 
the one central thing of all — his own spiritual 
life — he cannot err. He knows that ''this is 
the will of God, even his sanctincation." He 
may cry out for that w r ith perfect certainty; 
and for all other things, if he prays as every 
Christian ought, submitting his prayer to 
God's revision, " Nevertheless, not my will, 
but Thine be done;" then, whether the spe- 
cial blessing that he asked is sent or not, the 
larger petition with which he covered in and 
included his lesser one is surely answered. 
The thing he really "willed" is "done unto 
him." 

vi. 305. 



" Not as I will ": the sound grows sweet 
Each time my lips the words repeat. . . 
" Not as I will," because the One 
Who loved us first and best has gone 
Before us on the road, and still 
For us must all Plis love fulfil 
" Not as we will." 

Helen Hunt Jackson. 



NOVEMBER i. 305 



The riches of the glory of His inheritance in 
the saints. — Ephes. i. 18. 



T AM sure that the world is a better place for 
* you and me to live in to-day, not merely 
for the hundred great pattern lives which have 
passed into the heavens and which we call still 
by their names, but far more for the countless, 
nameless multitude of men and women who 
have wrought into the very substance of the 
earth, where at last they lay their bodies in 
unnoticed graves, the great, first, simplest 
words of God — that man was sacred, that 
duty was possible, that self-sacrifice was 
sweet, and that love for one's brother was the 
crown of life. And you ought not to be sat- 
isfied until you find yourself able to feel that 
the hope of doing something by your living 
to make the world in a real, although an un- 
appreciable, degree more full of these words 
for the men who are to follow us, is the noblest 
and most inspiring promise which can be set 

before your soul. 

VI. 268. 



For he who blesses most is blest, 

And God and man shall own his worth 

Who toils to leave as his bequest 
An added beauty to the earth. 

Whittier. 



306 NOVEMBER 2. 

WE have all stood upon the margin which 
was the farthest which feet untransfig- 
ured by death might reach, and sent some 
beloved soul into the unknown world. Where 
have we sent it ? To God, we say, bowing our 
heads with resignation. But is there no bleak- 
ness, no forlornness in our answer ? God is 
so far off! However loving, kind, or wise, 
He is all God; the child we sent Him was all 
man in his fresh, genuine humanity. But what 
if there be a humanity in God to which they 
go ? What if, since it went out from us, that 
human nature, made first in the image of 
Christ the human, has touched again that per- 
fect nature out of which it sprang and finds 
itself at home ? Yes, let me set this Christ 
eternally in the midst of the other world, and 
then the human soul that goes there goes to 
its own. It meets no strangeness on the other 
shore. . . . The child is gathered into the 
arms of a fatherhood and knows no strange- 
ness or surprise. The brother clasps hands 
with a newer and more trusty brotherhood. 
. . . They go to Jesus and rest in Him, and 
wait for us till our humanity, made perfect too 
by death, shall find its place beside them. 

VI. 325. 



Praise God the Shepherd is so sweet! 

Praise God the Country is so fair! 
We could not hold them from His feet; 

We can but haste to meet them there. 

B. M. 



NOVEMBER 3. 307 



Who, passing through the valley of Baca, make 
it a well. — Ps. lxxxiv. 6. 



IN man, the user, rests the real nature of the 
things he uses. They have no invariable, 
fixed nature apart from him. 

Now, let this great user, man, this one 
moral force, be called upon to go down into 
the vale of misery. He finds there all the 
circumstances of suffering — poverty, sickness, 
bereavement, sin itself; what then? these are 
things, and he is man. Let him rule them, 
not be ruled by them. Let him take down 
there a religious, trustful nature, a pious, 
cheerful heart, and there is more promised 
him than just that his cheerful piety shall sup- 
port him through; he shall exercise his human 
right of ruling and using these, and shall come 
out with a more perfect joy and certain faith 
than he carried in. He shall not come out 
half-dead with thirst, just able to drag himself 
up to the fountain at the end, but it shall be 
as David so beautifully says: " He shall drink 
of the brook in the way, therefore shall he 
lift up his head." 

VI. 28. 



O Lord, of good the fountain free, 
Close by our hard day's journeying, 
Be Thou the all-sufficing spring, 

And hourly let us drink of Thee! 

SUSAX COOLIDGE. 



3 o8 NOVEMBER 4. 

When no low thoughts of self intrude, 

Angels adjust our rights; 
But love that seeks its selfish good 

Dies in its own delights. 

How much we take, how little give! 

Yet every life is meant 
To help all lives; each man should live 

For all men's betterment. 

Alice Cary. 

MEN think that they can be safe without 
being helpful, and thence come all the 
selfish notions of salvation. Merely to crawl 
through life with face and mouth so bandaged 
up with caution that the foul air of life cannot 
affect us; merely to strike out from the wreck 
of a fallen world and swim ashore, shaking off 
all the drowning men who clutch at us in the 
wild water, and leaving the screaming wretches 
to their fate, — the man who seeks salvation 
so, finds at last to his disappointment and dis- 
may that he is not saved. It is not the hands 
that catch us and hold on to us, it is the 
hands of helpless men which we shake off in 
our selfishness that drag us down. iv. 347. 

Wherever upward — even the lowest round — 
Man by a hand's help lifts his feebler 
brother, 
There is the house of God, and holy ground: 
The gate of heaven is Love; there is none 
other. 
When generous act blooms from unselfish 

thought, 
The Lord is with us, though we know it not. 

Lucy Larcom. 



NOVEMBER 5. 309 

IT is not only the suffering in life that needs 
to be spoken to and helped. There is 
something else, I think, that is almost more 
exhausting than suffering in its constant wear- 
ing pressure upon the hearts of men. It is 
that feeling of the insignificance of life that 
often grows so hard to bear, . . . the wonder 
whether it means anything, the utter loss of 
any insight into what it means — this work of 
living. . . . Who can speak to and dispel this 
spectre ? Who can tell us with authority that 
life has a meaning, and make us see it and 
rejoice to live for it ? Who but the gospel of 
reconciliation ? If that is true, if all these 
heavenly forces are at work upon our life, if 
all this watchful interest hovers over what we 
are doing, if we may really go on and be the 
children of God, where is there any insignifi- 
cant detail ? Who can help feeling purpose run 
like life-blood through the half-dried veins of 
his discouragement ? How life lifts itself up 
with interest and dignity when it really be- 
comes the culture of God's redeemed children 
for their Father's house! 

VII. 107. 



I hear from all-wards, allwise understand, 
The great bird Purpose bears me 'twixt her 

wings, 
And I am one of all the kinsmen things 
That e'er my Father fathered. Oh, to me 
All questions solve in this tranquillity! 

Sidney Lanier. 



3io NOVEMBER 6. 



f^ REAT is the power of a life which knows 

^-* that its highest experiences are its truest 

experiences, that it is most itself when it is at 

its best. For it each high achievement, each 

splendid vision, is a sign and token of the 

whole nature's possibility. What a piece of 

the man was for that shining instant, it is the 

duty of the whole man to be always. . . . 

Strive for your best, that there you may find 

your most distinctive life. We cannot dream 

of what interest the world will have when 

every being in its human multitude shall shine 

with his own light and color, and be the child 

of God which it is possible for him to be, — 

which he has ever been in the true home-land 

of his Father's thought. 

The hope of the world is in the ever richer 

naturalness of the highest life. 

V. 21, 22, 23. 



Upward the soul forever turns her eyes; 

The next hour always shames the hour before; 

One beauty, at its highest, prophesies 

That by whose side it shall seem mean and 

poor. 
No Godlike thing knows aught of less and less, 
But widens to the boundless perfectness. 

James Russell Lowell. 



NOVEMBER 7. 311 



For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but 
against principalities, against powers, against the 
rulers of the darkness of this world. 

Ephes. vi. 12. 

LIFE is a battle. . . . The merchant is 
fighting with the competition of his 
brethren. The legislator is fighting with the 
barbarous tendencies which still haunt the 
most civilized societies. The philanthropists 
are fighting with abuses and ignorance and 
cruelty. And everywhere man, hopefully or 
hopelessly, is fighting with what he calls his 
fate, — the general aggregate of things about 
him which seems set to keep him down and to 
impede his way. The world is full of all these 
ideas of battle. And then right into the midst 
of them steps Paul, with his clear, ringing 
Christian word, "What are you fighting 
with ? Do you ask that ? " he says. " Lo, I 
can tell you. You are fighting with great 
evil principles and powers. . . . The rivalry 
of men, imperfect institutions, cruel habits, — 
all those are ugly enemies, but the real enemy 
is Badness itself. The real fight is with that. 

VI. 71, 72, 73- 

But shall I shun the sacred fight 

"Which good maintains with ill ? 
No: strong in my Redeemer's might, 

Be mine to wrestle still. 
Here only, in this strife, 

Can I His soldier be; 
Here only spend or lose a life 

For Him who died for me. 

J. CONDER. 



3 i2 NOVEMBER 8. 

And to keep himself unspotted from the world. 

James i. 27. 

WE set out for the battle in the morning 
strong and clean. By and by we catch a 
moment in the lull of the struggle to look down 
upon ourselves, and how tired and how cov- 
ered with dust and blood we are. How long 
back our first purity seems — how long the day 
seems sometimes — how long since we began to 
live. You know what stains are on your lives. 
Each of us knows, every man and woman. 
They burn to our eyes, even if no neighbor 
sees them. They burn in the still air of the 
Sabbath even if we do not see them in the 
week. You would not think for the world 
that your children should grow up to the same 
stains that have fastened upon you. You 
dream for them of a " life unspotted from the 
world," and the very anxiety of that dream 
proves how you know that your own life is 
spotted and stained. 

I. 176. 

Whiteness most white. Ah, to be clean again 
In mine own sight and God's most holy 
sight! 
To reach through any flood and fire of pain 
Whiteness most white; 

To learn to hate the wrong and love the right, 
Even while I walk through shadows that are 
vain, 
Descending through vain shadows into night. 
Christina G. Rossetti. 



NOVEMBER 9. 313 

IT is wonderful how mere power, or mere 
brightness, will win the confidence and 
admiration of men from whom we might have 
expected better things. A bright book or a 
bright play will draw the crowd, although its 
meaning be detestable. A clever man will 
make a host of boys and men stand like 
charmed birds while he draws their principles 
quietly out of them, and leaves them moral 
idiots. A whole great majority of a commu- 
nity will rush like foolish sheep to the polls 
and vote for a man whom they know is false 
and brutal, because they have learned to say 
that he is strong. All this is true enough; 
and yet while men do these wild and foolish 
things, they know the difference betw r een the 
illumination of a human life that is kindled 
from above and that which is kindled from 
below. They know the pure flames of one 
and the lurid glare of the other; and however 
they may praise and follow wit and power, as 
if to be witty or powerful were an end suffi- 
cient in itself, they will always keep their 
sacredest respect and confidence for that 
power or wit which is inspired by God, and 
works for righteousness. 

II. 12. 



Oh, we are sunk enough, God knows! but not 

quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure, though seldom, are denied us, when the 

spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones. 

Browning. 



314 NOVEMBER 10. 

With twain he covered his face. — Is. vi. 2. 

YOU can know nothing which you do not 
reverence. You can see nothing before 
which you do not veil your eyes! 

All of the mystery which surrounds and 
pervades life is really one mystery. It is God. 
Called by His name, taken up into His being, 
it is filled with graciousness. It is no longer 
cold and hard; it is all warm and soft and 
palpitating. It is love. And of this personal 
mystery of love — of God — it is supremely true 
that only by reverence, only by the hiding of 
the eyes, can He be seen. He who thinks 
to look God full in the face and question 
Him about His existence, blinds himself there- 
by, and cannot see God. He sees something, 
but what he sees is not God, but himself. 
There is in Christ the continual awe of a 
nature from the perfect knowledge of which 
the conditions of His human life excluded 
Him. And if He could not know the Father 
perfectly while He lived here in the flesh, shall 
we complain that we cannot ? Shall we not 
rather rejoice at it ? Shall it not be a joy to 
us to feel, around and through the familiar 
things which we seem perfectly to understand, 
the wealth and depth of Divinity, outgoing all 
our comprehension ? v. 256, 257. 

For greatness which is infinite makes room 

For all things in its lap to lie; 
We should be crushed by a magnificence 

Short of infinity. 

Faber, 



NOVEMBER n. 315 

And with twain did he fly. — Is. vi. 2. 

THERE are two extremes of error. In the 
one, action is disparaged. The result is 
that character itself fades away out of the 
inactive life. In the other, action is made 
everything. The glory of mere work is sung 
in every sort of tune. . . . The result is that 
work loses its dignity, and the industrious man 
becomes a clattering machine. Is it not just 
here that the vision of the wings comes in ? 
Activity in obedience to God. Work done for 
Him and His eternal purposes. Duty conscious 
of Him and forgetful of the doer's self, and so 
enthusiastic, spontaueous, — there is the field 
where character is grown, there is at once 
the cultivation of the worker's soul and the 
building of some corner of the Kingdom of 
God. 

Oh, my young friends, listen to the great 
modern Gospel of Work which comes to you 
on every breeze, but do not let it be to you 
the shallow, superficial story that it is to many 
modern ears. Work is everything or work is 
nothing according to the lord we work for. 
Work for God. . . . Then you are standing 
with your flying wings which will assuredly 
bear you into fuller light as they carry some 
work of God towards its fulfilment. 

V. 267. 



As the servants of Christ, doing the will of God 
from the heart. — Ephes. vi. 6. 



316 NOVEMBER 12. 

I ask not that for me the plan 
Of good or ill be set aside, 

But that the common lot of man 
Be nobly borne and glorified. 

Phebe Cary. 

IS it not true that any man makes his trade 
or occupation ready to be filled with the 
high motive of the love of God when he trains 
himself to look at it in its ideal, and, at the 
same time, is thoroughly conscientious in its 
duties ? The shoemaker who, having opened 
his heart to God's love, comes soonest and 
fullest to find the work of his lapstone and 
his bench touched and inspired by that mo- 
tive, will be the shoemaker who most con- 
ceives of his daily work as one connected with 
human comfort and strength, and who, at the 
same time, is most conscientiously faithful to 
its details. These things a man can do: he 
can resolutely abandon the sins which cannot 
be spiritualized; he can open all the channels 
of his life to spirituality by the study of the 
ideal, and by faithful work in every part of 
his living. One is the turning out of stran- 
gers; the other is the preparing of the chambers 
for the entering guest. The one is negative, 
the other positive. When both are done, then 
the man who has learned in one little spot — 
the conversion spot of his nature — that God 
loves him, and who has there begun to love 
God, may look to see that new motive run into 
all these newly opened chambers of his life, 
making the half-ready places completely ready 
by its touch. X. 23. 



NOVEMBER 13. 317 

WHAT is it that perpetuates the blighting 
influence of fashion ? What are the 
channels through which are spread abroad the 
false standard of wealth, the base idea of 
manliness which poisons countless hearts ? 
Are they not the same God-created channels 
through which the holiest influences were 
meant to flow? — "Simon, called Peter, and 
Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebe- 
dee, and John his brother " ? Many and many 
a time their brotherhood is the power of a 
common curse, instead of a common bless- 
ing. . . . What shall we do then ? . . . It is 
a very wide law and a very beautiful one, that 
the best way to make a thing fit for the use for 
which it was first made is to put it to that use. 
The best way to make the dusty trumpet clear 
is to blow music through it. The best way to 
make the sluggish mind capable of thinking is 
to think with it. And so the best way to make 
the natural relationships capable of carrying 
religious influence is to give them religious 
influences to carry, so strong and ardent 
that they shall force and burn their own way 
through whatever artificial obstructions may 
have stopped up the channel through which 
they were meant to go. 

V. 86, 89. 

Pour Thy Holy Spirit in! 

Sweep away the bars of sin; 

For the grace that comes from Thee 

Make us channels pure and free 

Unto those that nearest be! 

John Worden. 



NOVEMBER 14. 



THE Holy Ghost is the constructive princi- 
ple and power in human life. By Him 
every society of good men is bound together. 
By Him the Christian Church rises into the 
sky of God's grace like a majestic tree full of 
all precious fruit. By Him the family wins 
new sacredness, and every friendship of men 
who are trying to serve God is bound into in- 
dissoluble union with an unseen but strong 
compulsion. If you are afraid of yourself as 
you find how you are drawing away from your 
fellow-men and growing into a more and more 
selfish life, you must come to God; you must 
enter into the communion of the Holy Ghost. 
If you have a quarrel which you hate and 
know is miserable, but which holds you fast, 
your only freedom from it is in the commun- 
ion of the Holy Ghost. Come there and 
your quarrel will break and scatter as the ice 
melts when you bring it into the sun. ... It 
is the communion of a common forgiveness 
and a common inspiration. 

VII. 316. 

If thou be dead, forgive and thou shalt live; 

If thou hast sinned, forgive and be for- 
given; 
God waiteth to be gracious, and forgive, 

And open heaven. 

Set not thy will to die and not to -live; 
Set not thy face as flint refusing heaven; 
Thou fool, set not thy heart on hell: forgive 
And be forgiven. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



NOVEMBER 15. 319 

The Lord make you to increase and abound in 
love, one toward a?iother. — 1 Thess. iii. 12. 

WHAT is there that can keep the purity and 
loftiness of domestic life ? What is there 
that can preserve the color and glory of the 
family like the perpetual consciousness, run- 
ning through all the open channels of its life, 
that they are being used to convey the truth 
and the power of God ? 

IV. 83. 

What does it mean when religion enters 
into a family, w T hen over all the home life is 
stretched out the hand of God, and all a 
household is converted ? I do not know how 
to tell the story of what happens then — of the 
deep, sweet, solemn change that comes over all 
the family experience — except by just this 
phrase: that the communion of natural affec- 
tion has passed into the communion of the 
Holy Ghost. All these loves which were there 
before move on still, but they are all sur- 
rounded by and taken up into one great com- 
prehending love; and he who enters in at the 
door of that converted house hears them all in 
deepened, richened music, the same strains 
still, only full of the power of the new atmos- 
phere in which they are played. 

VII. 312. 

Sweetest things in Thee are sweeter, 
Holiest things in Thee completer; 
Therefore, Lord, our home-life enter, 
Be its light, its joy, its centre! 

Louise Mathilde. 



32o NOVEMBER 16. 

I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. 

Matt. v. 17. 

INFLUENCES come from man to man as 
the dew and sunshine come from the boun- 
teous heavens to the ready ground. . . . Your 
child, your scholar, your servant — you may 
fulfil him or you may destroy him. You de- 
stroy him if you fasten on everything that is 
bad and crude and ridiculous about him, and 
pour out upon it rebuke and contempt. You 
destroy him if you make him feel himself 
weak and insignificant, and drive him to de- 
spair. You destroy him if you make his great 
feeling about his own life to be shame. On 
the other hand you fulfil him, you fill him out 
to his full, to his fullest, if you catch every- 
thing that is good about him and water it with 
judicious encouragement and praise. You 
fulfil him if you recognize every feeblest and 
clumsiest effort to do right, if you inspire him 
with hope, if you make him seem to himself 
worth cultivating and watching and developing. 
Therefore, with all the strength which God 
has given us, let us be fulfillers. Let us . . . 
with sympathy and intelligence, patience and 
hope, bring up the lagging side in all the vital- 
ity around us, and assert for man the worth, 
the meaning and the possibility of this his 
human life. IV. 213. 

O Sun of our souls first arisen, 

Give us light for the spirits that grope; 

Make us loving and steadfast and loyal 
To bear up humanity's hope! 

Lucy Larcom. 



NOVEMBER 17. 321 

AS the sun that lightens us makes all the ob- 
jects round us the reflectors and distribu- 
ters of his radiance, and so brings his light to 
us clothed with the clearness that belongs to 
them, so to the Christian the Spirit of his 
Saviour seems to have subsidized everything 
to make some new and more perfect revela- 
tion of Him. The home relations and the 
things in nature, our books, our friends, our 
thoughts, have all been made interpreters 
of Christ. Oh, there are times when, as one 
sits in meditation or moves quietly about in 
work for Jesus — when all this seems so rich 
and plain. A beautiful, serene simplicity 
seems to come forth out of this complicated 
snarl. We catch the music of one great per- 
vading purpose in all this tumult and clatter. 
It is all redemption working out its plans. 
God made that hillside so perfect in order 
that He might show me His fatherly love. 
Christ gave me this task to do that I might 
understand His self-sacrifice for me. The 
Spirit brought me into my friend's friendship 
that it might so interpret to me the friendship 
of my God. At such times all seems plain. 
The world is for the sons of God. 

VII. 105. 



O Centre of all forms! O concord's home! 
O world alive in one condensed world! 
O Face of Him in whose heart lay concealed 
The fountain-thought of all this kingdom of 
heaven! 

George Macdonald. 



322 NOVEMBER 18. 

WE can well believe while the rose is but a 
bud, shut in between hard, glossy green 
leaves, gathering only the first dream of color 
into its pale petals, that its own color should 
seem to it the purpose of its life, just to be 
the perfect rose for the pure beauty of its per- 
fectness. But when the bud bursts and the 
rose is born — what then? A world is waiting 
for its fragrance and its loveliness. To serve 
that world, to send the colorless light inter- 
preted through its soft hues, and the odorless 
atmosphere translated by its fragrance, to be 
all that it may be for the sake of all that it 
may do — this is the larger purpose of its being, 
and, learning this, it ripens to the perfect 
flower. So may the scholar dream of pure 
self-culture for its own sake. It is a noble 
dream. . . . But if he grows he must outgrow 
it. He must grow in the direction of human- 
ity. All the vast needs of life lay hold on 
him. . . . All that he knows and loves must 
go out with him into all his life, and his schol- 
arship must be part of the father who sits in 
the family, of the citizen who votes at the 
polls, — if need be, of the soldier who fights in 
the ranks. . . . 

X. 272. 



Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, 

plant, 
And water it with wine, nor watch askance 
Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit: 
Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed. 

Emerson. 



NOVEMBER 19. 323 

1 CANNOT conceive of God standing and 
deliberately withholding from His world, 
or from any least and humblest of His ser- 
vants, till to-morrow any blessing which it is 
possible for Him to give to-day. But, on the 
other hand, I cannot conceive of God's giving 
to-day any blessing which to-day His world or 
His servant is unready to receive. Why is it 
that ages have lived on without the blessings 
of popular liberty and free government and 
well-guarded rights ? Is it that God has said, 
" The world shall not have them until my fa- 
vorite century and race appear" ? Is it not 
rather that God has said, " The world cannot 
have them until it has won by hard experience 
the heart and hand to which these blessings 
can be given, in which they can be held"? 
Why is it that God did not give you long ago 
the peace, the moral strength, which He will 
certainly give you some day if you persevere ? 
Has He been keeping them from you wan- 
tonly and wilfully ? Has He not rather been, 
nay, is He not, standing over you, eager to 
give them at the first moment when the gift is 
possible ? 

XII. 28. 



No more in heaven than earth will he find 
God, 

Who does not know His loving mercy swift 
But waits the moment consummate and ripe, 

Each burden from each weary heart to lift. 

Helen Hunt Jackson. 



324 NOVEMBER 20. 

And shall I behold Thee face to face, 
O God, and in Thy light retrace 
How in all I loved here, still wast Thou ? 

Browning. 

I LOVE to think of this, that where men to- 
day are most unconscious of His pres- 
ence, Christ is laying foundations for His 
future work. Here is a perfectly worldly man 
who cares nothing for Christ or Christianity, 
but yet Christ's touches are on him. He is 
surrounded with blessings; he is pressed upon 
with sorrows; he is led through apparently 
meaningless experiences; and all that some 
day, when he is really moved to cry out for a 
Son of God, Christ may be able to come to 
him, not new and strange, but with the strong 
claim of years of care and thought and un- 
thanked mercy. It makes the world very 
solemn to think how much of this work Christ 
must be doing everywhere. It makes our own 
lives very sacred to think how much of it He 
may be doing in us. 

V. 213. 

Our want and weakness, shame and sin, 

His pitying kindness prove, 
And all our lives are folded in 

The mystery of His love. 

His sun is shining pure and vast 

O'er all our nights of dread; 
Our darkness by His light at last 

Shall be interpreted. 

Alice Gary. 



NOVEMBER 21. 325 

And He took the seven fishes and the loaves, and 
gave thanks, and brake them, . . . and they did all 
eat and were filled. — Matt. xv. $6> 37. 



ALL the history of the progress of men's 
thought bears witness that when God 
wants to give men knowledge which they have 
not had before, He always opens it to them 
out of something which they have already 
known. Paul stands upon Mars' Hill at Ath- 
ens, and wants to show those people Christ. 
How does he begin ? He takes what he finds 
there. He points to their altar to the un- 
known god, and says, " Him whom ye igno- 
rantly worship I declare to you." He opens 
the books of their own writers and finds there 
his text, " As certain of your own poets have 
said." Out of their bit of truth he opens the 
rich completeness of the truth he has to tell. 
Is it not just exactly the miracle of Christ ? 
. . . Continuity and economy; these are the 
laws of Him who is leading us, the Captain 
of our salvation. He always binds the future 
to the past, and He wastes nothing. 

II. 134, 143. 



Not by strange, sudden change and spell, 

Baffling and darkening Nature's face; 
Thou takest the things we know so well, 
And buildest on them Thy miracle, — 
The heavenly on the commonplace. 

Susan Coolidge. 



326 NOVEMBER 22. 

And Jesus said: Make the men sit down. 

John vi. 10. 

QUIET has come in place of the noise; re- 
pose instead of action. It [the crowd] 
has become receptive. It is waiting to be 
fed. . . . Some day the headlong current of 
your life was stopped. The river ceased to 
flow. The waves stood still, and then the ocean 
which the flowing of the river had kept out 
poured up and in, and there were sacreder 
emotions in the old channels, and deeper 
hopes and fears were beating upon the well- 
worn banks. The day when your great be- 
reavement came, . . . the day when joy, with 
that subtle possibility of deep pain which is 
always in her eyes, came to your door and 
knocked, . . . the day when, being weak and 
ill, you did not go to your business, . . . those 
were the days when God was feeding you. . . . 
No life is complete which does not sometimes 
sit trustfully waiting to be fed of God. 

IV. 227, 232, 234. 

For not by bread alone 

Can we, Thy children, live: 
Some heavenly food unknown 

Thou unto us must give. 

Thy life, O God! Thy Word, 
Outspoken through Thy Son 

In Him our prayer is heard, 
Our heart's desire is won. 

The hidden manna this, 

Whereof who eateth, he 
Grows up in perfectness 

Of Christlike symmetry. Lucy Larcom. 



NOVEMBER 23. 327 

THERE is danger for many men, if not for 
all, in the perpetual outgo of energy 
which so much of our life involves. ..." All 
is going out, nothing is coming in;" is not 
that the dismay and the despair which settles 
down upon many an experience as it attains to 
middle life ? Existence comes to feel to many 
of us like a great river, which is always flow- 
ing with unbroken force downward to the sea. 
It never stops. It is always pushing its life 
outward. It gives the sea no chance to flow 
up into it. So is the ever energetic life of one 
whose sole idea is to exert influence, to make 
himself felt in some result. How often the 
river must long to pause. How often it must 
become aware that its impetuous rush is losing 
for it the richness of the great deep salt sea. 
How often the busy life of man becomes aware 
that somewhere round it there is richness 
which it does not get because it opens outward 
only, and not inward. . . . There is need of 
rest and receptivity. IV. 229, 230, 231. 

Many are coming and going with busy and 
restless feet, 

And the soul is hungering now, with " no lei- 
sure so much as to eat," . . . 

Oh, for a Sabbath of life, a time for renewing 
of youth, 

For a full-orbed leisure to shine on the foun- 
tains of holy truth, 

And to fill my chalice anew with its waters 
fresh and sweet, 

While resting in silent love at the Master's 
glorious feet. Frances R. Havergal. 



328 NOVEMBER 24. 

T ABOR and patience, activity and the 

^— ' growth which comes by passive suffering, 

ought always to make one single total life. . . . 

Make your most restful contemplation and 

your most receptive listening at the lips of 

God, not to be mere spiritual luxuries, but to 

be forms and modes of action. Make them 

acts. Let them call your powers into play. 

Let them be not listless, but full of vigor. Let 

them anticipate work for God and service of 

His children so earnestly and eagerly, that 

they themselves shall be work and service. 

He who learns these lessons lives a life as 

deep as the ocean and as powerful. There is 

no tedium or fretfulness for him. His life 

catches the quality of the life of God. He 

works while it is called to-day, and yet he has 

already reached the rest which remaineth for 

God's people. Such lives may God help us to 

live. 

IV. 241, 243. 

Toil is sweet, for Thou hast toiled; 

Rest is sweet, for Thou didst rest; 
Be our works from sin assoiled! 

Be our rest upon Thy breast! 

Be our work for Thee our rest! 

Be our strife for Thee our peace! 
Till our sun sink in the west, 

And we reap Thy joy's increase. 

J. L. M. W. 



NOVEMBER 25. 329 

He said unto me : Son of man, stand upon thy 
feet. — Ezek. ii. 1. 

Giving tha?iks always for all things unto God 
and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. — Ephes. v. 20. 

SHALL we, can we, thank God for His mer- 
cies, standing upon our feet and rejoic- 
ing that we are men, thoroughly grateful for 
the real joy of life ? Back of all the special 
causes for thanksgiving which our hearts rec- 
ognize, is there a thankfulness for that on 
which they all rest and in which they are sewn 
like jewels in a cloth of gold; for the mere 
fact of human life, for the mere privilege and 
honor of being men and women ? . . . 

If you have been dwelling solely on the evil 
that is in man, or on the special evil which you 
think is in your church, your nation, or your 
age . . . stand up! Stand up upon your feet! 
Believe in man! Soberly and with clear eyes 
believe in your own time and place. There is 
not, there never has been, a better time or a 
better place to live in. Only with this belief 
can you believe in hope. 

II. 149, 161, 162. 



How good is man's life, the mere living! how 
fit to employ 

All the heart and the soul and the senses for- 
ever in joy! 

Browning. 



330 NOVEMBER 26. 

Thou hast kept the good wine until now. 

John ii. 10. 

MAN says, " I choose to let the best come 
first; and then, if need be, things must 
degenerate. I would make sure of what good 
there is. I am so sure of nothing, that anything 
I can catch shall be caught instantly.'' But 
God says, " No! The world grows better and 
better. The best must be kept waiting till its 
time shall have arrived. The best cannot 
come until its time is ready. The best must 
not come first but last." It is a difference 
which one immediately feels when he comes 
into the region of the religion of Christ. The 
essence of Christianity is to believe that the 
world is growing better, that the life of man 
is growing better, under the discipline of 
Christ. It is calm and hopeful with great as- 
surances. It sets the old man, at the end of 
his career, in the midst of fulfilled promises 
and finished educations, splendidly saying, as 
he looks back over his life: " It has all been 
good, but this is the best of all. Thou, O 
Christ, O Master, hast kept the best wine until 
now! " XII. 7. 

As Thou hast made the world without, 
Make Thou more fair the world within; 

Shine through its lingering clouds of doubt; 
Rebuke its haunting shapes of sin; 

Fill, brief or long, my granted span 

Of life with love to Thee and man; 

Strike when Thou wilt the hour of rest, 

But let my last days be my best ! 

Whittier. 



NOVEMBER 27. 331 



When I would do good, evil is present with me. 

Rom. vii. 21. 

Px\UL'S story has been your story. You 
never sprang most bravely from the low 
order of your living, that a hand did not 
seem to catch you and draw you back. You 
never felt a new power start up within you that 
a new weakness did not start up by its side. 
. . . Awful has grown this certainty that no 
good impulse ever could go straight and unin- 
terrupted to its victorious result, and yet is it 
not wonderful how you have kept the assur- 
ance that good and not evil is the master- 
power of your life ? The resolution has been 
broken. It has limped and halted. It has 
stood for months, and made no progress, but 
it has never died. 

VI. 13. 

Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar, 

But cannot get the wood to burn; 
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter, 

And to the dark return. 
Old sap, or night-fallen dew, has damped the 
fuel; 

In vain my breath would flame provoke; 
Yet see — at every poor attempt's renewal 

To Thee ascends the smoke! 
'Tis all I have — smoke, failure, foiled en« 
deavor, 

Coldness and doubt, and palsied lack: 
Such as I have I send Thee; perfect Giver, 

Send Thou Thy lightning back! 

George Macdonald. 



332 NOVEMBER 28. 

When the fulness of time had conie, God sent 
forth His Son. — Gal. iv. 4. 

IT was the emptiest age that the whole moral 
and spiritual history of man had seen; 
and just that emptiness it was which made it 
the fulness of time for Christ. ... It was 
out of the deadness of millions and millions 
of souls that the cry for life came, — uncon- 
scious, unmeant, but no less recognized by 
Him who watches and answers not only the 
desires but the needs of men. 

And so with all of us is it not the fulness of 
time indeed ? Is there one of us who can say, 
"It is not my time yet?" Now while the 
morning is at hand, the night far spent; now 
while we have, it may be, but a little while 
left us to come to Christ or to come closer to 
Christ, to be a Christian or to be a better 
Christian; now while the Bridegroom's feet 
are close upon us, are sounding already in the 
distance, oh, let our loins be girded about, 
and our lights burning, and we ourselves like 
unto men that wait for their Lord. 

VII. 67, 71. 

Said Mark to Martin, " Wherefore spend 
Such constant care thy vines to tend ? 
It may be months, it may be years, 
Before the vineyard's lord appears." 

Said Martin, " Though it may be long 
Before I hear his harvest-song, 
If of that hour can no man say, 
It may be that he comes to-day." 

Julia Wood. 



NOVEMBER 29. 333 

ONLY when all was ready, only in the ful- 
ness of time, did Jesus come . . . and 
the men of whom He was the representative 
and the chief — have they their advents too ? 
It is easy to believe it about the greatest of 
them. . . . But it is hard to think the same 
of common people such as you and I. [Yet] 
hard as it is, great as is the strain which it 
puts on all our low habits of thinking about 
ourselves, the Bible is a strong and glorious 
call to men to gird up the loins of their minds 
and believe that God had a place for them and 
put them in their own place. . . . The begin- 
ning of a life goes back before the man is 
here, a visible fact upon the earth. It lays 
hold of the thought of God, which runs back 
to eternity. God knew your nature. He 
had a plan and pattern of your being in His 
mind. As David says, His eyes did see your 
substance, yet being imperfect, and in His 
book were all your members written. Know- 
ing you, He made ready a place for you; He 
shaped a cradle for you in the ages, and when 
it was all done He laid your new life in it — the 
advent before the nativity. VII. 4, 5. 

So take and use Thy work, 
Amend what flaws may lurk, 
What strains o' the stuff, what warpings past 
Thy aim! 

My times be in Thy hand, 
Perfect the cup as planned! 
Let age approve of youth, and death com- 
plete the same! 

Browning. 



334 NOVEMBER 30. 



In my Father s house are many mansions. I go 
to prepare a place for you. — John xiv. 2. 

AH! there is no friendship worthy of the 
sacred name where each of the two 
friends is not always thus making ready places 
for the other in higher and higher mansions of 
the Father's house, where each is not always 
opening to the other some higher life. Do 
not dare to think that friendship is a mere 
pleasant amusement. Do not dare to take out 
of it the moral responsibility that makes its 
depth and sacredness. . . . Husband and 
wife live together in perfect domestic sympa- 
thy. Not a thought of either that the other 
does not share. But when one of them enters 
into Christ and knows His peace and joy, it 
seems as if for the first time they had sepa- 
rated. But the soul that has found the Saviour 
comes back with its love, and tells the story of 
the Saviour it has found, and, Andrew-like, 
brings the other soul to the Christ in whose 
love it has found a place. Everywhere this 
ministry of life to life is finding its illustra- 
tions. 

VI. 175, 176. 

Come home with me, beloved, — 

Home to God's waiting heart! 
In gladness met together 

From paths too long apart; 
Strangers no more, but brethren, 

One life with Him to live; 
Eternally receiving, 

Eternally to give! 

Lucy Larcom. 



DECEMBER i. 335 

To every man according to his ability. 

Matt. xxv. 15. 

IT is a young man's right — almost his duty 
— to hope, almost to believe, that he has 
singular capacity, and is not merely another 
repetition of the constantly repeated average 
of men. Before he unfolds the bundle which 
his Lord has given him, he may well see in 
his imagination the ten bright talents shining 
through its folds. To see those dreams and 
visions gradually fade away; little by little 
to discover that one has no such exceptional 
capacity; to try one and another of the adven- 
turous ways that lead to the high heights and 
the great prizes, and find the feet unequal to 
them; to come back at last to the great trod- 
den highway, and plod on among the undis- 
tinguished millions — that is often very hard. 
. . . Yet the man of two talents has a great 
chance in the world. Alas for the world if he 
had not! For it is of him that the world is 
mainly composed. . . . And Christ must come 
with special welcome and appreciation and de- 
light to any man who feels his insignificance, 
and is in danger of losing himself in the vague 
mass of his fellows. 

IV. 198, 204. 

Be sure no earnest work 
Of any honest creature, — howbeit weak, 
Imperfect, ill-adapted, — fails so much, 
It is not gathered as a grain of sand 
To enlarge the sum of human action used 
For carrying out God's end. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 



3$6 DECEMBER 2. 



IV A EN get tired, one after another, of the fan- 
* ' * tastic and one-sided types of character 
which the world admires, and which seem to us 
very attractive at first. Expectant without 
impatience; patient without stagnation; wait- 
ing, but always ready to advance; loving to 
advance, but always ready to wait; full of 
confidence, but never proud; full of certainty, 
but never arrogant; serene, but enthusiastic; 
rich as a great land is rich in the peace that 
comes to it from the government of a great, 
wise, trusty governor, — this is the life whose 
whole power is summed up in one word — 
Faith. "Here is the patience and faith of 
the saints." This is the life to which men 
come who, through long years, "follow the 
Lamb whithersoever He goeth." 

II. 58. 



The bravely dumb that did their deed, 

And scorned to blot it with a name, — 
Men of the plain heroic breed, 

That loved Heaven's silence more than fame: 
Such lived not in the past alone, 

But thread to-day the unheeding street, 
And stairs to Sin and Famine known 

Sing with the welcome of their feet. 

Lowell. 



DECEMBER 3. 337 

With good will doing service ', a ^ to the Lord, 
and not to men. — Ephes. vi. 17. 

SUPPOSE — for it is at least supposable — 
that behind every other motive, shining 
through every other motive which made a man 
work, there had been this — the love of Christ. 
Whoever he worked for secondarily, he worked 
for Jesus first of all. Would that have made 
no difference ? Like an electric atmosphere 
poured around the shrine in which a jewel 
rests, so that no hand can be thrust through 
to steal the jewel; so round the work, full of 
its joy, is poured the love of Christ, out of 
which no man can snatch it. Suppose that 
some strong opponent keeps him from doing 
what he wants to do, — there is still the assur- 
ance that his doing that is but a part of a 
vaster accomplishment, — the will of his great 
Master, — which he knows must come in its 
completeness whether this special act of his 

attain success or not. 

III. 300. 

I seem to halt, and yet I know 
The breath of God is in the sails: 
Whether by zephyrs or by gales, 

The ships of God mast onward go. 
E'en when to rest He singeth them, 
He to the haven bringeth them. 

C. G. Hazard. 



338 DECEMBER 4. 

As unknown, and yet well known. 

2 Cor. vi. 9. 

ARE there not moments in your life when it 
seems to you as if you understood and 
knew yourself through and through ? You 
have listened to this clank of your machinery 
so long, that you know every sound that it 
makes. . . . " Know myself !" you say; " in- 
deed I do," grasping your own warm, hard 
flesh. "Am I not this, which lives thus? 
Why should I think myself mysterious ? " 
And then instantly, "Know myself! God 
forbid! Who am I that I should enter into 
the bosom of His eternal purpose, and study 
there what has only there real and final being ? 
Let me stand before my unknown self, and 
wonder." Poor and mangled is the life which 
has not thus seemed both to understand and 
be ignorant about itself. It must be either 
useless or visionless. 

VI. 284. 

But O my soul, as I thy good 

And evil ways explore, 
I seem to see the Christ in thee 

His earthly life live o'er. . . . 
Thou art that Temple where the Lord 

Out-teacheth scribes of law, 
Whence afterward with cords He makes 

Coarse mammon priests withdraw; — 
Thine inmost court, a holy place, 

The Lord's own glory-home, 
Thine outer, sentencing Him oft 

To shame and martyrdom. 

Denis Wortman. 



DECEMBER 5. 339 



Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were 
zaritten . . . that we, through patience, and com- 
fort of the Scriptures, might have hope. 

Rom. xv. 4. 

Welcome, dear Book! soul's joy and food! the 

feast 
Of spirits! heaven extracted lies in thee: 
Thou art life's charter, the Dove's spotless 

nest, 
Where souls are hatched unto eternity. 

Vaughan. 

WE circulate the Bible by the million. 
Some parts of it we read as a religious 
duty. But there are whole books of it teem- 
ing with interest which few of us ever touch. 
One sometimes feels that some day or other a 
great increase of the spiritual power of the 
Bible will come with what will be almost a re- 
discovery of its literary attractiveness. When 
people break through the strange feeling which 
has gathered around it that it is dull and un- 
real, and find that it is the most interesting 
book in all the world, then they will be open 
for its deeper power to lay hold upon their 
consciences and hearts. IV. 298, 

Above all, get the great spirit of the Bible 
. . . the idea without which it would all drop 
to pieces, — that there is not one life which the 
great Life-Giver ever loses out of His sight; 
not one which ever sins so that He casts it 
away; not one which is not so near to Him 
that whatever touches it touches Him with 
sorrow or with joy. I. no. 



340 DECEMBER 6. 

THE New Testament is a biography. Make 
it a mere book of dogmas, and its vital- 
ity is gone. . . . Make it the history of Jesus 
of Nazareth, and the world holds it in its heart 
forever. Not simply His coming or His 
going, not simply His birth or His death, but 
the living — the total life of Jesus in the 
world's salvation. And the Book in which 
His life shines orbed and distinct is the 
world's treasure. There, as in all best bio- 
graphies, two values of a marked and well- 
depicted life appear. It is of value, first, be- 
cause it is exceptional, and also because it is 
representative. Every life is at once like and 
unlike every other. Every good story of a life, 
therefore, sets before those who read it some- 
thing which is imitable and something which 
is incapable of imitation; and thereby come 
two different sorts of stimulus and inspiration. 
It gives us help like that of the stars which 
guide the ship from without, and also like that 
of the fire which burns beneath the engines of 
the ship itself. 

X. 428. 

Why must He lay His infant head 

In the manger where the beasts were fed ? 

So that the poorest here might cry, 

"My Lord was as lowly born as I." 

Is there no way to Him at last 

But that where His bleeding feet have passed ? 

Did He not to His followers say, 

" / am the Life, the Light, the Way " ? 

Phebe Cary. 



DECEMBER 7. 341 

THERE are few features in the life of Jesus 
which impress me more than the way in 
which His work and His growth, His effective 
and receptive life went on together. . . . True, 
there were times when He withdrew Himself, 
and, leaving all activity behind, lay on the 
mountain days and nights passive before His 
Father, waiting to be more completely filled 
with Him. But those were rare, exceptional 
occasions. The ordinary dependence upon 
God was perfectly expressed by those words 
to His disciples, " My meat is to do the will 
of Him that sent me! " When He gave the 
sermon on the mount, when He calmed the 
tempest on the lake, when He raised Lazarus 
from the dead, we do not doubt that both pro- 
cesses were going on, enfolded in the com- 
pleteness of each of those actions. He was 
saving the world, and He was becoming more 
perfectly His Father's Son at once. . . . 

Rest and action in the experience of the 
completest soul are not antagonistic; they are 
hardly distinct from one another. Action is 
the most refreshing rest, and rest is in some 
sense the most effective action to the soul that 
lives on complete dependence and obedience 
to God. 

IV. 240. 



But if I face with courage stout 

The labor and the din, 
Thou, Lord, wilt let my mind go out, 

My heart with Thee stay in. 

George Macdonald. 



342 DECEMBER 8. 



Strengthened with all mighty according to His 
glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffer- 
ing, with joy fulness. — Col. i. n. 

/~^NE sufferer cries, " Lord, make me 
^-^ strong; " another sufferer cries, " Lord, 
let me rest upon Thy strength.' ' Do you say 
they come to the same thing ? Yes, if the 
doing of the task, the bearing of the pain, 
is everything. Yes, if the only object is that 
the ship may not founder and the back may 
not break; but if, beyond this, there is hope 
and purpose that the man who does the task 
or bears the load shall himself become God- 
like in his doing and suffering, then no mere 
deposit of the strength of God can do the 
work — only the ever-open union of his life 
with God's, which makes the two lives really 
one, so that the power that is in God is not 
made the man's by being transferred from 
God's to him, but is his because it is God's. 

III. 126. 

God, whom my roads all reach, howe'er they 

run, 
My Father, Friend, Beloved, dear All-One, 
Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel, 
Self of myself. 

Sidney Lanier. 



DECEMBER 9. 343 

If this counsel or this work be of men, it will 
come to naught ; but if it be of God, ye cannot over- 
throw it, — Acts v. 38, 39. 

THAT which is rooted in God must live. 
There is no hope or peace anywhere in 
the world if this is not true. Who cares 
which way the fickle wind is blowing at this 
minute if there be no purpose which stands 
behind and governs it, no One who holds the 
winds in His hands ? But if there be, who will 
not labour bravely, trying to put himself into 
the current of the great purpose of the world; 
begging to be defeated if he mistakes the 
great purpose and is helping evil when he 
thinks that he is helping good; ready to wait 
and work through all delays; — sure of one 
thing and only one, that in the end, through 
every hindrance and delay, God must do 
right ? 

III. 262. 

I do not dare to pray 
For winds to waft me on my way, 
But leave it to a higher Will 
To stay or speed me, trusting still 
That all is well, and sure that He . . . 
Will land me — every peril past — 
Within the sheltered haven at last. 

Then whatsoever wind doth blow, 
My heart is glad to have it so; 
And blow it east, or blow it west, 
The wind that blows, that wind is best. 

Caroline A. Mason. 



344 DECEMBER 10. 

LIFE grows healthily from less to more. It 
does not begin with its best and fade 
away towards nothingness. It opens with 
promises which involve incompleteness, and 
goes forward with a climbing sun toward a 
rich and radiant noon. ... If I am travel- 
ling through a country which is sure to grow 
less and less rich as I get farther on, it is inev- 
itable that I shall strive at every step to gather 
all of its fleeting riches that I can. ... I 
shall leave no well untasted and no tree un- 
packed. I shall burden my shoulders with 
the load of what I cannot eat. But if I know 
that, as I pass on from field to field upon my 
journey, each is to be richer than the last, I 
shall be calm and patient and serene, seeing 
to-day in the broader light of to-morrow; 
asking to-day to give me its appropriate gift, 
not demanding of it that which it is not ready 
to bestow nor I to take; and going on with 
faith, which is the deepest and most precious 
result of every blessing. 

XII. 17. 



I will not wrong Thee, O To-day, 
With idle longing for To-morrow; 

But patient plow my field and sow 
The seed of faith in every furrow. 

Enough for me the loving light 

That melts the cloud's repellent edges,— 
The still unfolding, bud by bud, 

Of God's most sweet and holy pledges. 

Harriet McEwen Kimball. 



DECEMBER n. 345 

THE evening of your abundant prosperity 
arrived. The darkness gathered in 
about the radiant luxurious life which you 
had lived. No longer did it seem as if the 
sun shone and the flowers bloomed and the 
seasons came and went for you. You said, 
"It is all over. I have had my day." To 
some of you since you said that, there has 
come a great surprise. What seemed all over 
has proved to be but just begun. The day 
which you thought you had had, you can see 
now that you had hardly touched. Prosperity 
has come to mean to you another thing. The 
hours in which it meant plenty of money, 
plenty of friends, seem now so thin and super- 
ficial. To work, to help and to be helped, to 
learn sympathy by suffering, to learn faith by 
perplexity, to reach truth through wonder, 
behold! this is what it is to prosper, this is 
what it is to live. You did not really begin 
to live till the darkening of your happiness 
brought you into the knowledge of a happi- 
ness which can never darken. The evening 
and the morning have been your first day. 

VI. 331. 



Life's self, the immortal, immutable smile 

Of God on the soul, in the deep heart of 
Heaven, 

Lives changeless, unchanged; and our morn- 
ing and even 

Are earth's alternations, not Heaven's. 

Owen Meredith, 



346 DECEMBER 12. 

He came unto His own. . . . To them He gave 
power to become the sons of God. 

John i. 11, 12. 

THE man to whom it seems incredible that 
God should have been made man is not 
so likely to have been misled by a peculiar 
reverence for God as by an unworthy esti- 
mate of man. . . . He has taken things as he 
sees them and lost sight of their ideals. He 
has seen the mercenariness of friendship, the 
squalor of home, the animalness of love — 
everything sunk down out of its nobleness; 
and he has said, " There is no place for God 
here. It would degrade Him to become man, 
man being thus." Ah, brethren, if we could 
only begin at the other end ! God did become 
man, and therefore manhood must be essen- 
tially capacious of Divinity. He lived in a 
human home, and so our homes must be capa- 
ble of a Divinity they do not have. He en- 
tered into friendships, and so friendship must 
be sacred. He worked, and so work must be 
honorable. He cared for the body that He 
lived in, and so the body cannot be so vile as 
men have called it and as we make it. If this 
could be the way the Incarnation came to us, 
then surely it must be a constant inspiration 
to us that it was " His own " to whom Christ 
came. VII. 27. 

O soul of mine! I tell thee true, 

If Christ indeed be thine, 
Not more makes He himself thy kin 

Than makes He thee divine. 

Denis Wortman. 



DECEMBER 13. 347 

JESUS " came unto His own." To men for- 
getful of their godlike nature He came 
to tell them that they were the sons of God; 
and to men who could not do without Him 
He came because they needed Him. Oh, my 
dear friends, by what high warrants does the 
Saviour claim us for His own! Because we 
are His Father's children, and because we are 
so needy, therefore our divine Brother comes. 
He comes to you and says, " You called Me." 
And you look up out of your worldliness and 
say, " Oh no! I did not call. I do not know 
You!" But He says, calmly, "You did, 
although you do not know it. That power of 
being godlike which is in you, crushed and un- 
satisfied — that summoned me; and that need 
of being forgiven and renewed which you will 
not own — that summoned Me. And here I 
am! Now wilt thou be made whole? If 
thou canst believe, all things are possible to 
him that believeth." 

VII. 30. 



I did not know that I had called Thee, Lord: 
I knew not half my dearth, my sin, my 
grief; 
Yet gladly now I take Thee at Thy word, — 
Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief. 

John Worden. 



348 DECEMBER 14. 

CHRIST came in answer to a most urgent 
and pressing call of need. That is what 
it signifies when it is said that " He came unto 
His own." For in a true sense everything is 
a man's own which needs that man; not every- 
thing which he needs, but everything which 
needs him. Do you not know what that is ? 
Your child is yours not merely by the claim of 
birth and nature, but by the tie of continual 
dependence. He is most yours when he needs 
you most. . . . He came to those who needed 
Him; most of all to those who from the stricken 
earth held up to Him the deepest of all needs, 
the need of sin that craved forgiveness; and 
that was what made them His. Certainly no 
level-eyed intercourse of sinless man with sin- 
less Christ could have wrought in us such a 
profound and precious sense that we belong 
to Him as this simple knowledge that we need 
Him. Need has its sacred rights. Because 
we want forgiveness and help, and He only 
can forgive and help us, therefore we are His. 

VII. 28, 29. 



My faith burns low, my hope burns low, 
Only my heart's desire cries out in me 

By the deep thunder of its want and woe, 
Cries out to Thee. 



Lord, Thou art Life though I be dead, 
Love's Fire Thou art however cold I be: 

Nor heaven have I, nor place to lay my head, 
Nor home, but Thee. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



DECEMBER 15. 349 



He planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish 
it. — Is. xliv. 14. 

LET it not be a group of ash-trees, but a 
group of men, ... a thought of God 
entrusted to the earth for its embodiment and 
execution. What are these dreams and visions, 
these upward Teachings, these certainties of 
infinite belongings, — what are they, O thought 
of God, but the unbroken tension of the chain 
which binds the thinker to His thought for- 
ever ? And what are all these earthlinesses, 
these tender clingings to the things our senses 
understand, . . . these calls of present duties, 
this fear of dying, this love of the present, 
warm, domestic earth, — what are they all but 
the pressure of the warm ground upon the seed 
entrusted to it ? The man who does not some- 
how hold the complete truth about his life — 
both of these truths combined in one — does 
not live worthily. The man w T ho has and 
holds them both, look, what a life he lives! 
Look how substantially his roots are fastened 
in the earth. Look how aspiringly he lifts his 
branches to the sky. 

V. 282, 283. 

Here in Thy great world-garden, Lord, we 

stand: 
Keep us, for here the blossoms blight so fast! 
The fruit is flawed in turning from Thy beams 
To the biting east — to folly and to sin. 
And let all trees, the wildings of the wood 
And grafts of rarest culture, waft Thee praise! 

Lucy Larcom. 



350 DECEMBER 16. 

THE growth of the tree is a mysterious and 
spiritual power. It cannot be detected at 
its labor when with a sudden stroke of the axe 
you tear the tree's trunk open. Your sight is 
not keen enough to catch it. And yet how 
closely, how inextricably it is bound up with 
the grosser elements, in connection with which 
alone it does its work. There must be the 
black earth and the brown seed, or nothing 
comes. What growth-power ever made mani- 
festation of itself, creating out of nothing, 
in the air, a tree that had no history and no 
progenitor ? The material is first, and then 
the spiritual. 

And need I even suggest to you how every 
man has in his bodily constitution the physical 
basis of the most subtle and transcendent parts 
of his profoundest life ? Out of the very mar- 
row of his bones comes something which his 
finest affections never outgo, and which gives 
a color to his soul's loftiest visions. . . . 
There is a physical correspondent to every- 
thing he thinks or fancies. There is a physical 
basis to his most spiritual life. 

Do honor to your bodies. Reverence your 
physical natures, not simply for themselves. 
Only as ends they are not worthy of it, but be- 
cause in health and strength lies the true 
basis of noble thought and glorious devotion. 
A man thinks well and loves well and prays 
well because of the rich running of his blood. 

VI. 245, 246, 249. 

Health of body with health of soul — 
This is the only worthy goal. 



DECEMBER 17. 351 

The Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life; and man beca?ne a living soul. — Gen. ii. 7. 

1D0 not know, I cannot guess, what was 
the nature of the historical event to which 
that verse refers. But I do know that it is 
absolutely true to that great order which per- 
vades the universe. Everywhere the earthly 
conditions offer their opportunities to the 
celestial miracle. The fuel is cut in the woods 
of earth; it is piled, hard and lifeless, on the 
unheeding stone; and then from it the flame 
arises, a live aspiring column, and lays its 
fiery tribute at the feet of God. "That is 
not first which is spiritual, but that w T hich is 
natural ; and afterward that which is spiritual. " 
Would it not be good ... if these words 
should be written in golden letters on the 
walls of every gymnasium and also on the 
walls of every school of learning and cell of 
meditation in the world ? . . . As they stood 
on the walls of the gymnasium, what they 
declared would be the need of a strong body 
for all best spiritual life. As they stood writ- 
ten on the study wall, they would mean the 
utter failure of the strongest body unless a 
spiritual life came down from above and occu- 
pied it, came out from within and clothed it 
with a worthy purpose. VI. 246, 248. 

Let us not always say, 

11 'Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! " 

As the bird wings and sings, 

Let us cry, " All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul." Browning. 



352 DECEMBER 18. 

TPHERE are men deeply impressed with the 
* infiniteness of life. . . . There comes 
great happiness to them. That happiness is 
perfectly hollow unless there is a meaning be- 
hind it, unless it tells of intentions some- 
where, unless it means love. They know 
that " Eat, drink, and be merry," is not the 
end of it all. To love some one who is loving 
them, that is what they want to do. " Oh, 
that I could find Him ! Oh, that I could find 
Him!" is their cry. Great sorrow comes. 
But to them sorrow cannot rest in broken 
limbs or lost fortunes. Those again are only 
symbols. The essential thing lies deeper. 
. . . Then if any glimpse is offered of a 
Son of God, a manifestation of the Invisible 
Deity who sends happiness and sorrow and 
who can forgive sin, there is no tendency to 
disbelieve; there is the hunger of the heart 
leaping with hope, there is the stretching out 
of the arms as when they told Bartimeus, 

" Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." 

V. 207, 208. 

'Neath some shadow oft I wait, 
Like blind Bartimeus at the gate, 
Assured that when my Lord draws nigh, 
Sin, doubt, and darkness all shall fly; 
Hence to His cross I cling the more, 
Whene'er these shadows touch my door. 

John Ordronaux. 



DECEMBER 19. 353 

The Lord is at hand. — Phil. iv. 5. 

OH, my dear friends, if you knew that in 
the most evident of all ways, which is 
by death, the Lord were coming to you to- 
morrow, and if you could be perfectly free 
from all base feeling, from fear and flurry, 
from defiance and from dread ? . . . what 
would be the condition which it would make 
in you ? Would it be any elevation, refine- 
ment, solemnity, and broadening of life ? 
Would it be the calming of frivolity, the re- 
lease of charity, the kindling of hope ? Would 
it not be all of these ? 

Not yet for us does that great, solemn foot- 
fall sound outside the door. But none the less 
is the Lord at hand. He is always at hand. 
All expectation may be expectation of Him. 

IV. 368. 



Who shall know the Master's coming? 
Whether it be at dawn or sunset, 
When night dews weigh down the wheat-ears, 
Or while noon rides high in heaven, 

Sleeping lies the yellow field ? 
Only, may Thy voice, Good Master, 
Peal above the reapers' chorus, 
And the sound of sheaves slow falling, — 
" Gather all into My garner, 

For it is My harvest time! " 

Dinah Muloch Craik. 



354 DECEMBER 20. 

THAT life which we dream of in ourselves 
we see in Jesus. Where was there ever 
gentleness so full of energy? What life as 
still as His was ever so pervaded with untiring 
and restless power ? Who ever knew the pur- 
poses for which he worked to be so sure, and 
yet so labored for them as if they were uncer- 
tain ? Who ever believed his truths so en- 
tirely, and yet believed them so vividly as 
Jesus ? Such perfect peace that never grew 
listless for a moment; such perfect activity 
that never grew restless or excited; these are 
the wonders of the life of Him who going up 
and down the rugged ways of Palestine, was 
spiritually walking on "the sea of glass 
mingled with fire." 

As more and more we get the victory over 
the beast, we too are lifted up to walk where 
he walked. For this all trial, all suffering^ 
and all struggle are sent. 

IV. 126. 



Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of 

sin ? 
The blood of Jesus whispers peace within. 

Peace, perfect peace, by thronging duties 

pressed ? 
To do the will of Jesus, this is rest. 

Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown ? 
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne. 

E. H. BlCKERSTETH. 



DECEMBER 21. 355 

Y\ 7HEN Jesus had risen from the dead, you 

* * remember, His disciple refused to be- 
lieve till with his own hand he had felt the 
wounds in the hands and feet and side. And 
Jesus gently rebuking him, compares, as it 
were, the methods of authority and experi- 
ence, of faith and science, so to speak, to the 
advantage of the former when He says, 
"Thomas, because thou hast seen thou hast 
believed. Blessed are they that have not seen 
and yet have believed." And yet when we 
come to think of it, is not His rebuke really 
that Thomas had not used the method of ex- 
perience enough, not that he demands it too 
much ? He rebukes him that in all the years 
that they had been together he had not ob- 
served Him deeply enough to learn His char- 
acter and understand His words. Is He not 
pleading, not against science, but for a higher 
science ? . . . " If I do not the works of my 
Father believe me not," a direct appeal to 
experience. 

VI. 133. 

Oh, for a faith more strong and true 
Than that which doubting Thomas knew — 

A faith assured and clear, — 
To know that He who for us died — 
Rejected, scorned, and crucified — 

Lives and is with us here! 

Phebe Cary. 



356 DECEMBER 22. 

And a little child shall lead them, — Is. xi. 6. 

HE who helps a child helps humanity with 
a distinctness, with an immediateness, 
which no other help given to human creatures 
in any other stage of their human life can pos- 
sibly give again. He who puts his blessed 
influence into a river blesses the land through 
which that river is to flow; but he who puts 
his influence into the fountain where the river 
comes out puts his influence everywhere. No 
land it may not reach. No ocean it may not 
make sweeter. No bark it may not bear. No 
wheel it may not turn. Sometimes we get at 
things best by their contraries. Learn the 
rich beauty of helping a child by the awful- 
ness of hurting a child, — hurting a child even 
in his physical frame, — hurting him still more 
in soul and mind. The thing that made the 
Divine Master indignant as He stood there in 
Jerusalem was that He dreamed of seeing be- 
fore Him a man who had harmed some of these 
little ones, and He said of any such ruffian, 
"It were better for him that he had never 
been born." If it is such an awful thing 
to hurt a child's life, to aid a child's life is 
beautiful. X. 506. 

Great hearts have largest room to bless the 
small; • 
Strong natures give the weaker home and rest; 
So Christ took little children to His breast, 

And with a reverence more profound we fall 
In the majestic presence that can give 
Truth's simplest message: " 'Tis by love ye 
live." Lucy Larcom. 



DECEMBER 23. 357 

THE first truth is the essential unity of 
* man's life and God's, and so the es- 
sential glory of humanity. Christ came not 
merely to man, but into man ; and that was 
possible because the manhood into which He 
entered was "His own," had original and 
fundamental unity with His Godhood, was 
made in the image of God. Here was man, 
made in God's image, separated from God, 
trying spasmodically to struggle back, failing 
and falling so continually that the conscious- 
ness that he belonged w T ith God was well-nigh 
lost. That it might not be lost, that it might 
be a real and living thing, it must be asserted 
from the other side. Man and God had the 
capacity of entrance into each other. Since 
man would not, and, as it almost seemed now, 
could not enter into God, God would enter 
into man. Man had failed of being Godlike; 
God, then, would be manlike, and so the first 
truth — that God and man belonged together 
— should not be lost for want of assertion. Is 
not this a noble and inspiring value of the In- 
carnation ? vil. 26. 

Lord, if Thou grant me grace to hear and see 
Thy very Self who stoopest thus to me, 

I make but slight account 
Of aught beside wherein to sink or mount. 
Christina G. Rossetti. 



358 . DECEMBER 24. 

Because there was no room for them in the inn. 

Luke ii. 7. 

RELIGION makes us feel the littleness to 
which we have reduced our lives, and 
then proclaims, in contrast with that littleness, 
the great capacity God meant them to have. 
"You have cramped your life," it seems to 
say. " You have made it small and narrow. 
By long unspirituality you have made its 
doors so low that none but short or stooping 
thoughts can enter. You have made its 
rooms so mean that great truths can not live 
in them. But never dare to think that this 
was God's plan for your life. He drew its 
architecture on a lordly scale. He designed 
for you great, generous, capacious lives. He 
built you to be ' temples of the Holy Ghost.' 
. . . You may make your lives foul and taw- 
dry and meagre; you may diminish and over- 
crowd them till there is no room for a noble 
thought or a pure desire; but you do it at 
your peril. God made them roomy; and there 
is room for His holy Son to find a nativity 
within them if you will only set and keep 
their chambers open." 

VII. 80, 81. 



Christ, He requires still, whensoe'er He comes 
To feed or lodge, to have the best of rooms: 
Give Him the choice; grant Him the nobler 

part 
Of all the house: — the best of all's the heart. 

Herrick. 



DECEMBER 25. 359 

The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, 

John i. 14. 

WHO is it that lies once more to-day be- 
fore the world, the Son of God and Son 
of man, at Bethlehem ? Mary bows down and 
learns the Incarnation, and feels the solem- 
nity and sublimity of the human life into 
which the Divinity has entered. The wise 
men come and find their King in this weak 
babe. The shepherds see the hope of Israel 
fulfilled, the Saviour come. Oh, on this Christ- 
mas Day let us be with them all! Let us feel 
thrilling through this humanity which we so 
often scorn the glorifying fire of the Incarna- 
tion. Let us give up our lives to Him and beg 
that He will rule them. But, more than all, 
let us give our souls, hungry and sinful, a 
Christmas leave to go to Him who is their 
Saviour, whom they will know for their Saviour 
if we let them go to Him. 

It is a day of joy and charity. May God 
make you very rich in both by giving you 
abundantly the glory of the Incarnation, the 
peace of Christ's kingship, and the grace of 
Christ's salvation. 

VII. 96. 



The heart must ring Thy Christmas bells, 

Thy inward altars raise; 
Its faith and hope Thy canticles, 

And its obedience praise! 

Whittier. 



360 DECEMBER 26. 

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and 
peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope by 
the power of the Holy Ghost, — Rom. xv. 13. 

SUCH peace in believing is to be distinctly 
a peace by Gospel faith. . . . Let me be 
a thorough believer in Jesus Christ, — let me, 
that is, have taken Him with all the revela- 
tion of humanity that there is in Him, and 
where is the fellow-man with whom I shall not 
be at peace ? Is it the man who domineers 
over me and bullies me ? The supreme mastery 
of my Lord adjusts all these lower masteries, 
and compels them to keep their proper places. 
When I have learned really to " fear Him who 
can cast both soul and body into hell," I am 
able indeed not to "fear them that can kill 
the body." The martyr seeing Christ stand- 
ing at the right hand of God is at full peace 
with his murderers. 

VI. 203, 204. 

And he [St. Stephen] kneeled down, and cried 
with a loud voice : Lord, lay not this sin to their 
charge. And when he had said this, he fell 
asleep. — Acts vii. 60. 

Oh, for the vision that sufficed 
That first blest martyr after Christ, 

And gave a peace so deep 
That while he saw with raptured eyes 
Jesus with God in Paradise, 

He, praying, fell asleep ! 

Phebe Cary^ 



DECEMBER 27. 361 

-Thou wilt hide the??i in the secret of Thy pres- 
ence . . . from the strife of tongues. 

Ps. xxxi. 20, 

THE very words are full of peace before we 
hardly touch them to open their meaning. 
But their meaning is deeper the more we study 
it. . . . Suppose that St. John should come 
and talk with you, or be at your side without 
a word in the midst of the wildest of our 
social Babels. Would he not bring his peace 
with him ? Would you not let every one else 
go, and be alone with him, even in all the 
crowd ? And now if it is possible, instead of 
the great disciple, for God Himself to be with 
you, so that His presence is real, so that He 
lets you understand His thoughts and lets you 
know that He understands yours; and as close 
to you — nay, infinitely closer — than the men 
who crowd you round, and whose voices are 
in your ears, the unseen God is truly with 
you, what then ? . . . He has blinded you to 
all but Himself. He has hid you in the secret 
of His presence. 

I. 83, 84, 85. 

Yet shall I envy blessed John ? 

Nay, not so verily, 
Now that Thou, Lord, both Man and God, 

Dost dwell in me: 
Upbuilding with Thy Manhood's might 

My frail humanity; 
Yea, Thy Divinehood pouring forth, 

In fulness filling me. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 



362 DECEMBER 28. 

It is no little thing when a fresh soul, 

And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured 

scope 
For good, not gravitating earthward yet, . . . 
Are sent into the world, — no little thing 
When this unbounded possibility 
Into the outer silence is withdrawn. 

James Russell Lowell. 

WHAT is it when a child dies ? It is the 
great Head-master calling that child up 
into His own room, away from all the under- 
teachers, to finish his education under His own 
eye. The whole thought of a child's growth 
and development in heaven is one of the most 
exalting and bewildering on which the mind 
can rest. Always the child must be there. 
Always there must be something in those who 
died as children to make them different to all 
eternity from those who grew up to be men 
here among all the temptations and hindrances 
of earth. There must forever be something 
in their perfect trust in the Father, something 
in the peculiar nearness and innocent famili- 
arity of their life with Jesus, . . . something 
pure even among all the perfect purity which 
we shall all have reached, something wiser 
than the wisest, showing that even there there 
is a revelation that can be given only to the 
babes; something more perfectly triumphant 
and serene to mark forever the perfected life 
of those who never sinned. 

IV. 149. 

These are they which follow the Lamb whither- 
soever He goeth. — Rev. xiv. 4. 



DECEMBER 29. 363 

It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we 
know that when He shall appear we shall be like 
Him. — 1 John iii. 2. 

IS life decreasing or increasing ? Is it grow- 
ing richer or poorer ? The ordinary cheap 
philosophies assume that life is like a fire 
which speedily reaches the fulness of its heat, 
and then fades and fades till it goes out. The 
high philosophy which gets its light from God 
believes that life, as it moves deeper and 
deeper into God, must move from richness 
into richness always. . . . All that we believe 
is but the promise of the perfect faith. All 
that we do is great with its anticipation of the 
complete obedience. All that we are but 
gives us suggestions of the richness which our 
being will attain. Those moments make our 
real, effective, enthusiastic life. They create 
the fulfilment of their own hopes and dreams. 
Oh, cherish them! Oh, believe that no man 
lives at his best to whom life is not becoming 
better and better, always aware of greater and 
greater forces, capable of diviner and diviner 
deeds and joys! XII. 21, 22. 



Oh, sweet to live, to love, and to aspire! 

To know that whatsoever we attain, 
Beyond the utmost summit of desire 

Heights upon heights eternally remain, 
To humble us, to lift us up, to show 
Into what luminous deeps we onward go. 

Lucy Larcom. 



364 DECEMBER 30. 



// is toward evening ; and the day is far spent. 

Luke xxiv. 29. 

THE year which came to us twelve months 
ago, all fresh and young, is old and 
weary. A new year will come to crowd him 
from his place. On such a day it is not mere 
habit, it is a natural and healthy instinct, 
which makes us stand between the new year 
and the old, between the living and the dead, 
and listen to them as they speak to one another. 
The old year says to the new year, " Take 
this man and show him greater things than I 
have been able to show him. You must be for 
him a fuller, richer day of the Lord than I 
could be." The new year says to the old, " I 
will take him and do for him the best that 
I can do. But all that I can do for him will 
be possible only in virtue of the preparation 
which you have made, only because of what 
you have done for him already." 

IV. 357. 



I am fading from you, 

But one draweth near, 
Called the Angel-guardian 

Of the coming Year. 

I brought good desires, — 

Though as yet but seeds, 
Let the New Year make them 

Blossom into deeds. 

Adelaide A. Procter. 



DECEMBER 31. 365 

Then cometh the end. — 1 Cor. xv. 24. 

/ ivill rei?iember the years of the right ha?id of 
the most High. — Ps. lxxvii. 10. 

TF around this instability of human life is 
* wrapped the great permanence of the life 
of God ... if the whole element of time 
is so lost in His eternity that not the begin- 
ning and the ending of experiences but their 
spiritual relations to our growing characters 
is everything, — then is there not light upon it 
all ? To value everything which comes to 
me, and yet to know that not its form but its 
spiritual essence is really valuable, therefore 
to hasten while I have it to get out of it what 
it has to give me, and to even rejoice that 
some day in the loss of its formal presence I 
shall be able to make myself completely sure 
of the possession of its spirit, — that is the true 
attitude of the soul toward every good thing 
that God gives, — health, friends, wealth, 
learning, time. 

V. 369. 

Why cry so many voices, choked with tears, 
" The year is dead! " It rather seems to me 
Full of such rich and boundless life to be, 
It is a presage of the eternal years. 
... So let us rather cry: 
This year of grace still lives; it cannot die! 

Mary G. Slocum. 



ASH-WEDNESDAY. 367 

Turn ye even unto Me with all your heart, and 
with fasting. — Joel ii. 12. 

FASTING is both a symbol and a means. 
Every kind of abstinence is at once an 
expression of humility and an opening of the 
life. What then is Lent ? Ah, if our souls 
are sinful and are shut too close by many 
worldlinesses against that Lord who is their 
life and Saviour, what do- we need? Let us 
have the symbols which belong to sin and to 
repentance. Let us at least for a few weeks, 
among the many weeks of life, proclaim by 
soberness and quietude of life that we know 
our responsibility and how often we have been 
false to it. Let us not sweep through the 
whole year in buoyant exultation, as if there 
were no shame upon us, nothing for us to re- 
pent of, nothing for us to fear. By some 
small symbols let us bear witness that we know 
something of the solemnity of living, the 
dreadfulness of sin, the struggle of repent- 
ance. . . . Perhaps the symbol may strike in 
and deepen the solemnity which it expresses. 
Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow 
for our sins we have, our sorrow for our sins 
may be increased, and while we stand there 
in His presence the fasting may gather a truer 
reality of penitence behind it. 

II. 214. 

Who goeth in the way that Christ hath gone 
Is much more sure to meet with Him than one 
That travelleth byways. 

George Herbert. 



368 GOOD FRIDAY. 

It is finished. — John xix. 30. 

OH, what a finishing that was! It is as if 
eternity were crowded into the heart of 
Him who spoke. All He had been forever had 
consummated itself at last. The long yearn- 
ing to let men know what a love waited for 
them in the heart of God was satisfied. The 
light was kindled on the mountain-top, and 
already the quick ear of Divinity heard the 
stirring in thousands of valleys, where men, 
hopeless before, were gathering up their bur- 
dens and with the inspiration of an unfamiliar 
hope were starting to struggle up with them, 
determined not to rest until they cast them 
down into the shadow of that unseen cross. 
What cry like this has the world ever heard ? 
Not even that first utterance of calm creative 
power, " Let there be light," had greater 
meaning or sublimity than this last agony of 
love that burst from the lips of the satisfied 
Redeemer: " I have been lifted up. I shall 
draw all men unto Me. Now it is finished/ ' 

VII. 265. 



Done is the work that saves! 

Once and forever done, 
Finished the righteousness 

That clothes the unrighteous one. 
The love that blesses us below 
Is flowing freely to us now. 

HORATIUS BONAR. 



EASTER DAY. 369 



That I may know Him, and the power of His 
resun-ection. — Phil. iii. 10. 

THE life of a true Christian seems to me to 
be full of Easters; to be one perpetual 
renewal of things from their lower to their 
higher, from their temporal to their spiritual 
shape and power. You are called upon to give 
up a luxury, and you do it. The little piece 
of comfortable living is quietly buried away 
underground, . . . undergoes some strange 
alteration in its burial, and comes out a spir- 
itual quality that blesses and enriches your 
soul forever. ... So the partial and imper- 
fect and temporary are always being taken 
away from us and buried, that the perfect and 
eternal may arise out of their tombs to bless 
us. . . . They are not simply taken away to 
be kept — the child that you saw die, the dream 
that you saw fade — to be kept in some future 
state till you shall be fit to come and get 
them; . . . they are here all the time; not to 
be had by-and-by, but to be had now. They 
can be had in their spiritual return to you by- 
and-by only as you first have them and keep 
them spiritually now. . . . The power of the 
future resurrection is all along a power of 
present regeneration. 

What can I do, then, but invite you all to 
know that power by earnest self-surrender, by 
patient prayer, and by a childlike faith that 
willingly takes into its loving life the willing, 
living, loving Christ of Easter Day ? 

VII. 277, 278, 285. 

He that hath the Son, hath life. — John v. 12. 



37o ASCENSION-DAY. 



A cloud received Him out of their sight. 

Acts ii. 



FOR a human being to go out from this 
earth is a dreadful thing if it is only with 
this earth that humanity has any known rela- 
tion. . . . But now let us believe in the Ascen- 
sion. Once a human being — the best and 
completest of all human beings that have ever 
lived, the human being whose humanity was 
perfect by its very union with Divinity — has 
gone, still human, out of the sight of men, — 
gone, evidently all alive. We can not trace 
His course. The cloud received Him. But 
yet we know that somewhere out beyond the 
limits of our little earth that true humanity 
of His has found a home. Humanity can live 
beyond the earth, can keep broad live rela- 
tions with the universe. The man who goes 
to-day, then, goes still into the dark, but the 
darkness into which he goes is pierced by a 
path of light, and at its heart there is a home 
of light to which he goes. The humanity of 
Jesus has gone before and makes the vast un- 
known not unfamiliar. Around our thought 
of it our thoughts of the men we have seen 
die, our thoughts of our own coming deaths, 
can gather with confidence and calmness. 

VII. 298. 



Thou Who wast Centre of all heights on the 

Mount of Beatitudes, 
Grant us to sit w T ith Thee in heavenly places. 
Christina G. Rossetti. 



WHITSUNDAY. 371 

He saith u?ito them y Have ye received the Holy 
Ghost since ye believed 2 — Acts xix. 2. 

AND what that first Whitsunday was to all 
the world, one certain day becomes to 
any man, the day when the Holy Spirit comes 
to him. God enters into Him and he sees all 
things with God's vision. Truths which were 
dead spring into life and are as real to him as 
they are to God. He is filled with the Spirit 
and straightway he believes; not as he used 
to, coldly holding the outsides of things. He 
has looked right into their hearts. His belief 
in Jesus is all afire with love. His belief in 
immortality is eager with anticipation. Can 
any day in all his life compare with that day ? 
If it were to break forth into flames of fire and 
tremble w T ith sudden and mysterious wind, 
would it seem strange to him — the day when 
he first knew how near God was, and how true 
truth was, and how deep Christ was ? O, have 
we known that day ? O, careless, easy, cold 
believers! if one should come and ask you, 
" Have you received the Holy Ghost since you 
believed ? " dare you, could you, answer him, 
"Yes"? II. 227. 

I bow my forehead to the dust, 
I veil mine eyes for shame, 

And urge, in trembling self-distrust, 
A prayer without a claim. 

No offering of mine own I have, 
Nor works my faith to prove; 

I can but give the gifts He gave, 
And plead His love for love. 

Whittier. 



372 TRINITY SUNDAY. 



Through Him we both have access by one Spirit 
unto the Father. — Ephes. ii. 18. 

SEE what Godhood the soul has come to 
recognize in the world. First, there is 
the Creative Deity from which it sprang, and 
to which it is struggling to return — the divine 
End, God the Father. Then there is the 
Incarnate Deity, which makes that return pos- 
sible by the exhibition of God's love, — the 
divine method, God the Son; and then there 
is this Infused Deity, this divine energy in the 
soul itself, taking its capacities and setting 
them homeward to the Father — the divine 
Power of Salvation, God the Holy Spirit. 
To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. 
Let us keep the faith of the Trinity. . . . 
Let us seek to come to the highest, through 
the highest, by the highest. Let the end and 
the method and the power of our life be all 
divine. If our hearts are set on that, Jesus 
will accept us for His disciples; all that He 
promised to do for those who trusted Him, He 
will do for us. He will show us the Father; 
He will send us the Comforter; nay, what can 
He do, or what can we ask that will outgo the 
strong and sweet assurance of the promise: 
Through Him we shall have access by one 
Spirit unto the Father. 

I. 243, 246. 

We from Thy oneness come, 
Beyond it cannot roam, 

And in Thy oneness find our one eternal home. 

Faber. 



PHILLIPS B ROOKS'S WRITINGS. 

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cloth, gilt edges, $2.50. 

Among the thirty-seven Essays are "Heresy," "The Best 
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CONTENTS. 

First Journey Abroad. 1865-1866. 

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Summer in Northern Europe. 1872. 

From London to Venice. 1874. 

England and the Continent. 1877. 

In Paris, England, Scotland, and Ireland. 1880. 

A Year in Europe and India. 1882-1883. 

England and Europe. 1885. 

Across the Continent to San Francisco. 1886. 

A Summer in Japan. 1889. 

Summer of 1890. Last Journey Abroad. 
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PHILLIPS BROOKS'S WRITINGS. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS YEAR BOOK. 

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pages. Gilt top, $1.25. 

u I am so much impressed with its wonderful insight and the 
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